Comments on: asteroid.gnome.org

By: Jeff Waugh

Jeff Waugh — Sat, 02 May 2009 09:09:02 +0000

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. ;-)

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:04:23 +0000

If it’s like librefm’s identi.ca feed, it’ll look like spam :|

By: foo

foo — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 04:38:28 +0000

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

By: Thomas Thurman

Thomas Thurman — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:59:20 +0000

@Alan:

I did specifically mention identi.ca in the post.

By: Alan

Alan — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:51:28 +0000

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.

By: Paul Cutler

Paul Cutler — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:40:46 +0000

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.

By: mike

mike — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:21:54 +0000

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!

By: Chris Lord

Chris Lord — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:51:57 +0000

Good idea and I’d like to be on it! (@cwiiis)

By: Seif Lotfy

Seif Lotfy — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:07:44 +0000

Love it! I could help you out if you want to!

By: Dylan McCall

Dylan McCall — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:04:24 +0000

I would totally be interested if it was presented as a Javascript Asteroids clone :)