don't sweat it Brad, people will always find SOMETHING to complain about.

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I've had to have this exact discussion a number of times already, and I'm probably getting as tired of it as you are.

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One of the reasons that PSHB continues to lead in my mind, is that rssCloud is... well, only for RSS. It's a separate system, and has nothing to do with the format that it's being used in. (Element namespaces aside...)

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Hi Brad -- Dave Winer here.

We implemented the cloud element in Radio and Manila, two leading blog platforms, in 2001 and 2002. So it's not true that no one implemented it. And it wasn't hiding, it was right there in the RSS 2.0 spec, which is a very widely implemented format.

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Sorry, I meant widely implemented. 2 implementations isn't very many.

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One could make the argument that since you integrated it and nobody else ran with it, that it was really more of an example or prototype.

If I write it, and I'm the only user, it's a hard sell to say that it was implemented. IMO, of course.

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Remember that this is Dave Winer we are talking about - he's pretty much the expert when it comes to these sort of things. He basically is the RSS spec.

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Dave Winer is the RSS 'expert' because he makes it up as he goes along — specifications are meaningless to him, he'll just edit the canonical version live without bumping the version number, much less telling anyone.

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I would take it as a compliment that he's complaining about something you're doing.

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Brad. Kudos for Pubsubhubbub: this is a key piece of technology. I hope that you and Dave can found a middle ground: the competition is not an alternative spec but the proprietary micro messaging platforms. May be the solution is to: get pubsubhubbub, make RSS a first class citizen, add a section explaining how it is an evolution of RSS Cloud) and even use the RSS cloud name (in my opinion pubsubhubbub is too complex of name for it to become mainstream).

Can we try to set up a time for you and Dave to sit down and discuss this?

-Edwin Khodabakchian (edwink@devhd.com, co-founder of feedly)

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Edwin: Could you elaborate on what you mean by first-class citizen? RSS is fully supported (0.92, 1.0, 2.0) by the reference implementation and documented here (http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/wiki/RssFeeds).
-Brett

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Heh, this is starting to sound pretty epic. Like Israel and Palestine sitting down to talk peace negotiations.

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Too complex a name? This is just the next step in Brad's effort to see how far he can push the naming insanity. We keep slurping up his technology that he spews out and the names just get weirder. What's in a name? The name means nothing.

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You're right to tout the benefits of how PubSubHubbub is being created.

As a member of the RSS Advisory Board, I can't stress enough how important it is for specs to be written as a public process. The RSSCloud Interface should not be controlled by one person, as I argue today on my blog:

http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3559 (http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/3559)

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As usual, interacting with Dave Winer leads to no good. You should have known better than to try to engage with him. Best just to ignore him, stay far, far away, and don't let him get involved in anything you care about.

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Kragen, fwiw, I've been interacting a lot with Dave lately, and a bit with Brad and Brett on this, to try and help explain the benefits of all this work to outsiders. Here's the real-world perspective: All three are on the side of the angels. They're doing good work, iterating in their own way, and are gonna get good results. And frankly, they've all been magnanimous and open to feedback, even though they're obvious coming at this from slightly divergent points of origin.

Do I wish things were a little less complicated? Sure, but ultimately, the distinctions between these systems will filter out, and we'll have one or two (but less than three!) systems that enable a valuable new ecosystem. Let the shippers ship, and don't be one of those guys who's flaming one side or the other. If you have an opinion, then commit code or make something useful, but I care too much about the overall success of the effort to have decentralized realtime infrastructure to let this turn into another stupid internet shitstorm that distracts from the work at hand.

In short, don't be That Guy. I don't think you wanna be That Guy. :)

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Yes!

An rssCloud <-> PSHB proxy would be trivial. I'm just happy we're making data realtime. The only sad part is that developers might be confused for awhile.

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Let's be honest here and put what everyone knows to be true on the table. Dave Winer is a jerk. That's been amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions by Dave Winer himself. He is also a grumpy old narcissist who wants his name associated with everything. Any reasonable person looking at pubsub vs. RSS cloud would conclude that pubsub is a better solution - but Dave can't handle that so he's going to bitch his way into the spotlight. He "could have invented Twitter" - but he didn't, so he's bitter about that. RSS cloud "could have been big" - but it wasn't, so now he's bitter about that. What would truly be great is if everyone would just ignore Dave Winer and let RSS cloud go the way of several of his other dumb ideas that never went anywhere. (Flickrfan, anyone?) Dave Winer is the Kanye West of tech.

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That's an unfair comparison — Kanye West has taste, talent, produces original work that is massively successful on its own merits, and most importantly he does great collaborative work.

Dave Winer has none of those qualities.

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And just makings hubs do the hard part of understanding various types of incoming "pings", but then normalizing their outgoing notifications.

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Point taken, but the larger idea I was trying to get across is that insulting *any* of the guys hacking on this stuff is just going to distract them from doing good work, because we're all human and want to defend ourselves or our friends or whatever. I don't worry about Brad or Brett or Dave getting code shipped -- I worry about everybody else wanting to see the spectacle of a stupid flamewar.

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Is a track record fact or insult?

I don’t hate Winer… I don’t even know him. I’ve just seen too much of his spectacle already – thus: don’t worry; and, I’d rather people studiously ignore him.

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Anil,

You've been around long enough to know that although Dave's heart is apparently in the right place, his mental health issues create a high risk of things falling apart when he touches them. In this case, Dave is That Guy: he wrote a spec ten years ago and implemented some prototypes, and now that other people are doing the work of making something similar into reality, he wants to be involved and get credit. This is a bad idea. Dave Winer is not an asset. He is a liability. Every hour you spend interacting with him is an hour you're going to regret for the rest of your life when he viciously turns on you.

Here's a short list of some of the projects Dave has attempted to derail over the years: RSS 1.0, Atom, JSON (!), WDDX, Bronco/Casbah — all because they did or intended to do something similar to some project of Dave's, but not the way he wanted. The best case is something like JSON, where people basically ignore the guy and he goes away. The worst case is Casbah, where the project fades away because everybody loses interest.

So what makes you so optimistic that he's changed?

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We could have had one protocol instead of two if WordPress implemented PSHH instead of RSSCloud. Is it too late to convince them to switch?

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This reminds me of the early days of OpenID when there were all the other random OpenID-like systems that did mostly the same thing but with different bits on the wire. I think just as with OpenID vs. TypeKey (for example) it won't be too hard to map between these things so that one can be implemented in terms of the other.

While we're on the subject of bridging things, it'd be neat to have a hubbub hub that can use weblogs.com-style pings as an optional second notification mechanism so that folks running software that already supports such pings don't need to install anything new to get started.

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I already did this in July, but we haven't turned it on:

http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/source/browse/trunk/hub/main.py#1762

The issue is that XML-RPC pings only take the channel URL, so you have to parse HTML to rediscover the actual feed URLs, or maintain a relation of feeds to channel links (the latter is easier, actually).

Otherwise, I still think that light pinging is going to hinder everyone long-term. The performance characteristics are bad. I'm starting to expound on why here:

http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/wiki/ComparingProtocols

Feedback would be appreciated!

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Comments on some posts I read indicate they think only Google can run a hub, which is where the "bigco sux" stuff comes from. Can you preemptively respond to that? (Perhaps by amending your post in the paragraph where you talk about 20% time.)

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PS they just checked libjingle into Chrome since it's used for bookmarks sync. If you have any grand plans involving XMPP bridges into JS I'd be interested in hacking them out.

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So far, I did a presentation on how to build a hub here:
http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/wiki/BuildingAHub

But more documentation (and a more thorough compliance test suite than we already have) would be great.

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and XEP-0060 just isn't getting adopted, probably because XMPP weirds people out

what about GTalk and Wave? and how will PubSubHubbub communicate with these? XMPP-0060, some other gateway or, ugh, a bot?

what do you think of the Superfeedr architecture?

why can't gateways and clients start using XEP-0004 more like XEP-0060 asks? what if Google had bridged this chicken-and-egg gap.. (possibly with the help their own handrolled protocol a la VOIP *wonders how long until someone implements Jingle in Wave..*)?

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That's completely unfair. Ted Nelson actually invented a lot of cool stuff, wrote a couple of important books, and funded a lot of research.

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And the problem with Nelson's ideas is their utopian idealism -- Winer's ideas are simply terrible.

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