
Sam Altman feels there is space for a Twitter successor - arturventura
https://twitter.com/sama/status/567046711638388737
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arturventura
I'm posting this, because I'm curious about what the Hacker News readers think
about it and I want to read a better discussion larger than 140 characters...

~~~
smt88
I've had an idea for this stewing in my head for a while. It's definitely not
a business idea. More like a standard. Think of it as "RSS at the speed of
Twitter".

Basically, I want URLs to be handles and self-hosted blogs to be posts. I'm
still trying to figure out the federation aspect, but aggregators could scan
domains for lists of users by checking "johndoe.name/microblog.json", or there
could be a centralized server with a list of aggregators.

If microblog.json exists, it contains a list of users' URLs, and each of those
is a list of posts. Each post has a short, less-than-140-character summary,
and it may have a longer version. The aggregator can decide how to display
short vs. long, but I'm imagining having the summary be clickable, and then
the full text will roll into view.

The aggregation server otherwise functions a lot like Twitter. You can follow
other people, and it might suggest other people to follow.

URLs are long, of course, but there are ways to shorten them. If the user is
posting under their domain (johndoe.name), then their handle just becomes the
domain.

If they're posting under a subdirectory-style URI, like "twitter.com/johndoe",
then their subscriber only sees the "johndoe" part.

The subscriber doesn't need to know which domain "johndoe" is from, because
she chose to subscribe to johndoe and will recognize the handle. If she
subscribes to "someotherdomain.com/johndoe", then the aggregator can cleverly
distinguish between them (with a tooltip, different colors, small subheading,
etc.)

An initial aggregator would have to include Twitter, Google+, Tumblr, and any
other publicly-hosted blogging service currently used for short posts. That
would allow people a smooth transition.

