asteroid.gnome.org

I’d like to make a page which was like Planet GNOME except that it listed all the tweets and dents that GNOME people were producing. When it grew up, perhaps it could become “asteroid.gnome.org” (because it’s like a mini planet). Bad idea or good idea? Would you read it? Would you like to be on it?

Published by

Thomas Thurman

Mostly themes, triaging, and patch review.

10 thoughts on “asteroid.gnome.org”

  1. I would expect many unrelated tweets, which would take up to much time to read. (and you have to read much of a tweet to get an idea what’s it about).

    But I think it would be nice as a “marketplace” for twitterers.

    so maybe I find a few new people worth following.

    So I would be interested, and visit it from time to time (probably more often than i should). GOO!

  2. Thomas – this is a great idea. Want to drop a note to the marketing list and we can try and scope out what it might take? I thought one of the distros had done something similar as well, I wonder if there is code out there.

  3. I’m a little surprised no one has commented yet on getting locked in to proprietary services like Twitter.

    Planet had blogs.Gnome.org and identi.ca deployment would be seem to be the equivalent in this case and users could still interconnect/syndicate to Twitter if they want.

  4. During a similar discussion in Debian, someone mentioned pluto.debian.org would be a good name for a micro-blogging site.

  5. There is a somewhat commonly recognised name for this: a “Pulse” (which is pleasantly alliterative with its planetary friend).

    In early cases, these were set up as microblog accounts themselves, such as ‘pulseofubuntu’ and so on, but reposting cited tweets/dents appears to be a bit of a waste of time (just makes things very noisy).

    I do like the idea of doing it as a page, and I’ve considered adding a sidebar with exactly that on Planet GNOME.

    One challenge: It’s easy to aggregate feeds of people’s Twitter/Identica accounts, but that’d be kinda boringish. It would be hard, though, to do single-stream live updating because, for a start, the Twitter search interface limits the number of characters in a search query. This makes it hard to do “from:personone OR from:persontwo” (and so on) for many, many users.

    You’d want a single source because you wouldn’t want browsers collecting feeds for 100s of users.

    The “more work” solution would involve aggregating streams of Tweets/Dents (rather than using RSS feeds) on a server and then letting clients pull those rather like the Twitter search API (you can include a “last ID I’ve seen” parameter).

    Well, that was a longer braindump than I thought I’d be writing when I started. ;-)

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