-----Original Message----- From: Evan Prodromou [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Fri 1/30/2009 21:52 To: Joss Winn Cc: Jason Reusch; [email protected] Subject: Re: [Laconica-dev] Roadmap for the near future Joss Winn wrote: > +1 for pulling messages from those you are following on Twitter into > Laconica. Best feature I've heard suggested yet. However much I like > Laconica and want to use it for all my mublogging, it's where your > community is that matters and 90% of my community is happy to use > Twitter. So, first of all, use the invitation system.
Second, there are lots of big pains in the butt with this process. First, we'll have to actually pull your friends' data from Twitter. That means we'll need to poll their API periodically -- which will interfere if you're using another API client. It'll also be a lot of work for us -- making tens or hundreds of thousands of API calls every 5 minutes (or whatever the throttle time is now). Second, we'll have to figure out licensing. I'm pretty sure that the only requirement is a link back to Twitter (see http://twitter.com/terms), but there may be other requirements. We may need to make sure that Twitter statuses from your friends are only visible to /you/ -- in the Web interface, IM output, RSS feeds, and API output. That's a big hassle; it's also going to screw up our caching. Also, we'll have to deal with nickname issues. That's going to suck. Finally, some high-profile people in our community really hate this idea. (e.g., Steve Gillmor). I can see making this functionality work, but it's a huge undertaking, and I'm not entirely sure I like what kind of site and what kind of community we'd be afterwards. -Evan Fair enough. I figured there would be good reasons for not doing this or it would have been implemented already. Thinking about it, the issue here for me is having applications that can aggregate features and messages from both APIs in realtime so that it doesn't matter if a message is coming from Twitter or a Laconica installation. XMPP was the answer until Twitter turned it off. RSS is too slow. I'm using Twhirl at the moment because it can put the stream of messages side by side, but that's not the same as combining them all into one single window that is platform agnostic. LaTwit does a decent job of it on the iPhone. Anything on the Desktop that does it with such flexibility? Thanks. Joss _______________________________________________ Laconica-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
