On PubSubHubbub and rssCloud ...

[brad]

Are you confused about the difference between PubSubHubbub and rssCloud?  You're not alone.

Here's how the confusion came about:

Dave Winer invented rssCloud way back in the day.  It only distributed lite pings, the callback endpoint was the IP address that you subscribed from, and nobody really ever implemented it, so you

Comments

[kragen]

As usual, interacting with Dave Winer leads to no good. You should have known better than to try to engage with him. Best just to ignore him, stay far, far away, and don't let him get involved in anything you care about.

[anildash]

Kragen, fwiw, I've been interacting a lot with Dave lately, and a bit with Brad and Brett on this, to try and help explain the benefits of all this work to outsiders. Here's the real-world perspective: All three are on the side of the angels. They're doing good work, iterating in their own way, and are gonna get good results. And frankly, they've all been magnanimous and open to feedback, even though they're obvious coming at this from slightly divergent points of origin

[brad]

Yes!

An rssCloud <-> PSHB proxy would be trivial. I'm just happy we're making data realtime. The only sad part is that developers might be confused for awhile.

Dave Winer is the Kanye West of Tech

[kragen]

Let's be honest here and put what everyone knows to be true on the table. Dave Winer is a jerk. That's been amply demonstrated on innumerable occasions by Dave Winer himself. He is also a grumpy old narcissist who wants his name associated with everything. Any reasonable person looking at pubsub vs. RSS cloud would conclude that pubsub is a better solution - but Dave can't handle that so he's going to bitch his way into the spotlight. He "could have invented Twitter" - but he didn't, so he's bitter about that. RSS cloud "could have been big" - but it wasn't, so now he's bitter about that. What would truly be great is if everyone would just ignore Dave Winer and let RSS cloud go the way of several of his other dumb ideas that never went anywhere. (Flickrfan, anyone?) Dave Winer is the Kanye West of tech.

Re: Dave Winer is the Kanye West of Tech

[blasdelf]

That's an unfair comparison - Kanye West has taste, talent, produces original work that is massively successful on its own merits, and most importantly he does great collaborative work.

Dave Winer has none of those qualities.

[edge_walker]

I don’t see how Brad ignoring Winer, as Kragen suggests, can possibly impede anyone from shipping anything. If it can do anything, it is to speed things up, and prevent pain further down the road. (I hope Brad and Brett haven’t lost that much time already.) So Kragen’s advice is perfectly compatible with your cause.

[anildash]

Point taken, but the larger idea I was trying to get across is that insulting *any* of the guys hacking on this stuff is just going to distract them from doing good work, because we're all human and want to defend ourselves or our friends or whatever. I don't worry about Brad or Brett or Dave getting code shipped -- I worry about everybody else wanting to see the spectacle of a stupid flamewar.

[edge_walker]

Is a track record fact or insult?

I don’t hate Winer… I don’t even know him. I’ve just seen too much of his spectacle already - thus: don’t worry; and, I’d rather people studiously ignore him.

[kragen]

Anil,

You've been around long enough to know that although Dave's heart is apparently in the right place, his mental health issues create a high risk of things falling apart when he touches them. In this case, Dave is That Guy: he wrote a spec ten years ago and implemented some prototypes, and now that other people are doing the work of making something similar into reality, he wants to be involved and get credit. This is a bad idea. Dave Winer is not an asset. He is a liability. Every hour you spend interacting with him is an hour you're going to regret for the rest of your life when he viciously turns on you

Let's look at WordPress...

[kragen]

We could have had one protocol instead of two if WordPress implemented PSHH instead of RSSCloud. Is it too late to convince them to switch?