On 29 March 2010 04:28, Carlo von Loesch <[email protected]> wrote: > Of course Twitter is not the model - it is completely centralized. > The decentralized answer to this is pushing events to the intended > recipients as they happen. You can use HTTP POST madness for this, > as Blaine Cook considers feasible, or use or design a protocol > actually optimized to do this job. There is a reason why chatrooms > are usually not implemented by HTTP POST orgies.
Actually, increasingly they are. I'm not the only one advocating this approach. I agree it's not optimal, but as you speak of "wisdom" in another thread, I'll reiterate that I built one of the largest implementations of a "chatroom" ever built, and worried a lot about the inefficiencies therein. As it turns out, Twitter is far bigger than when I was worrying about these inefficiencies, and still runs on HTTP polling. It's appalling, it's horrendous, but developers love the HTTP, and most importantly, it's massively successful. So the wisdom I've gained is that sometimes the "best" technology doesn't win; more often than not, the most suitable technology wins. And isn't that the most important thing here? Do we want a highly tuned race-car of a P2P decentralized network that has no users, that concedes to Twitter and Facebook the bulk of users and their freedom? Or do we want a successful technology that empowers more people and promotes and extends freedom to them? You're welcome to create something entirely new, but I'd suggest you start by mocking up some designs as to how your P2P network is meant to work /for users/, and not just geeks. The same applies to the usability of the underlying technology as far as your target technological audience is concerned (in this case, your audience is almost certainly web developers - c.f., GNU Social targeting PHP). The technology is important, but the usability and desirability of the end result is far more so. Ignore this at your peril. b.
