On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 8:58 AM, Vassil Dichev <[email protected]> wrote: >> The public timeline can be useful in the early days of a microblogging >> service, as I have recently discovered with the introduction of SAPTalk >> at SAP. While there are only a few users of a service and the social >> graph is very sparse, the public timeline is the easiest way to find & >> follow new people. >> >> Once the service is established, the public timeline is much less useful >> - but it's still quite a good way for complete newbies to get a feel for >> what's going on. Without the public timeline, new users have a chicken & >> egg problem to deal with - they access the service, see very few (if >> any) messages, and wonder what the big deal is with all this >> microblogging nonsense and don't come back for 6 months. > > Very good point. To clarify, what I don't think is a good idea is to > keep real-time updates for the public timeline. Neither Twitter nor > identi.ca show messages in real-time, but a snapshot. This should be > OK for us, too. > > To be sure, it would look cool to show the message flow in real-time, > as long as they come in quantity below a certain threshold. It doesn't > make sense to show messages that come faster than one can read them, > though, and the load would bring the system to a crawl. > > So the idea was at least to show the public timeline in a view > separate from the default message stream and think about potential > performance improvements later, which would enable some impression of > real-time flow. For instance, if the public timeline is updated in > batches and cached, this should be fine. > > How does that sound?
Good idea. I'd like to have a public timeline that is updated in real-time but using an "older" functionality you can get older messages from the public timeline. The question is whether we can use the existing streams functionality for this. Ideally, you could click on a link entitled "public timeline" on the main page and the streams page woould be shown with the public timeline active. >
