On Jan 18, 2009, at 12:17 PM, zvi wrote: > The main problem w/ watching one's friends on a different danga > service through your flist is that you don't get their flocked > posts (or even indication that they made a flcoked post.) > > And the reason this doesn't happen is because the syndicated feed > you make on the journaling service is not authenticated, and the > reason it is not authenticated, at least in part, is because > syndicated feed urls are public and, the way authenticated rss is > usually done now, would include your password. Also, the journaling > site caches the feed itself, for a short period. > > And I thought there had been some discussion on the list about how > to work around these things, but if so, it hasn't been transferred > to the wiki. Does anyone remember such conversations taking place > and can point me to them? Or, if someone's working on the issue now > and wants to talk about it, I'd love to hear current thinking. > > If the answer is that thinking hasn't got very far :) , there are a > couple of online feedreaders that support authenticated feeds. > Googlereader is not one of them. I've been told that netvibes and > newsgator both do. > > P.S. I ask because I think that better cross-site flocking is the > real killer app of getting people to switch, even more than WTF. > Although, I do understand that lots of unique and unrepeated feeds > might make it the memory/bandwitdth kiling app, too.
There hasn't been a lot of progress made, no, exactly because of the reasons you specify -- and actually, it's not the "lots of unique and unrepeated feeds" that'd be the real killer, if we depended entirely on the existing RSS integration into the LJ codebase and added RSS authentication over top of it. The real killer would be "popular friends-only journal on LJ syndicated onto DW and watched by many people who are friended by that journal owner" -- because that would mean every time someone on DW loaded their readlist, we'd have to either a). hit LJ up for it, which would very quickly get us locked out of using LJ's API, or b). cache that friends-only-on-LJ post and just re-check the credentials with LJ every time someone tried to read it, which is very very very troublesome and sleazy and just a whole world of no. This is not unsolveable -- as you point out, there are feedreaders that have solved it. The answer's going to be, I have no doubt, breaking away from the existing "RSS feeds as quasi-DW accounts" setup that we inherited. I have some ideas about how such a system might work in terms of usability, but I Am Not The Backend Person (tm) (and Mark is in Las Vegas this weekend making plans for his wedding, so I'm sure he'll have some ideas when he gets back). If you wanted to take point on coordinating the brainstorming for how it should work, by collecting discussion and brainstorming on the wiki or whatever, that would be incredibly awesome, because I happen to agree with you that yeah, it is the killer app of getting people to switch, and the first site that can offer that is going to own this niche market. The person who takes point on coordinating doesn't need to be able to solve the problem, just work up lists of what It Should Do and talk with various people as to how they think it could be done ... --D -- Denise Paolucci [email protected] Dreamwidth Studios: Open Source, open expression, open operations. Coming soon! _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
