grack.com

I caught the audio of the rssCloud get-together in Berkeley tonight and it was very enlightening.

One of the first points brought up was the problematic subscription API. The subscription API requires that the endpoint live at the the same IP address as the system making the subscription request. Dave Winer’s response was basically “we can’t and won’t change the protocol because it’s too widely deployed”. He asked that anyone who wanted to change this fork the protocol. Unfortunately, the lack of flexibility in assigning endpoint URLs makes this a very difficult sell for larger organizations where outgoing and incoming HTTP requests are routed differently. I think this was a big mistake on Dave’s part here. There’s a great opportunity to fix the glaring holes in the protocol (those 7.5 million blogs on Wordpress run the same WP rssCloud plugin that I do).

Some other interesting points were brought up, such as the lack of a block button (useless in a distributed web) and ideas for distributed identity. Tunneling was quickly brought up, but the discussion moved on just as quickly.

At one point, someone asked about rssCloud support in Atom. Dave Winer suggested using a namespace for the element and some discussion took place on it. I’m not sure who brought it up, but it will likely be blogged and Dave will point to it to make it official. Noone brought up the already-specified <link rel= tag as an alternative, unfortunately.

Another interesting item brought up was that Wordpress will be supporting Pubsubhubbub as well at some point in the future. It was more convenient to support rssCloud first, so they went with it. Dave Winer and Matt Mullenwag joked that when they do, “just don’t say rsscloud is dead”.

More notes are available from @susiewee’s live twittering.