Upcoming cross-site reading list, Salmon protocol

[charmian]

1. Very informative post about upcoming features at DW.

To wit, there is

a) discussion of the cross-site reading list. It will be a paid user feature, it will only show the last 100 entries and be updated every 60 min, and the entries from the other site will ONLY be visible to the person subscribing to them (even if they are public otherwise).
b) in the future, it will be possible to upload communities to DW, if you are a maintainer (and probably, you should also get permission)
c) the new entry posting page: the 'metaphor' underlying posting will be changed, to incorporate new drafting options,

Anyway, someone has already protested the cross-site reading list, perhaps unaware that RSS/ATOM allows people to read LJ-entries off of LJ. Maybe someone ought to point out to this person that they can at least disable syndication of entry content in RSS/ATOM on LJ? They can't disable it totally, though (if they don't like the fact that they can't totally disable RSS, then they should stop using LJ, because that's how things are there).

EDIT: It seems that DW will actually not be using authenticated RSS for this new feature: http://dw-news.dreamwidth.org/17591.html?thread=1814455#cmt1814455

2. I mentioned the Salmon Protocol in my last post. Here's more info on the subject.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/salmon_protocol_for_distributed_aggregated_content.php <--Read Write Web post on the SP.

http://salmon-playground.appspot.com/ <-- A prototype of the Salmon Protocol

http://www.alevin.com/?p=1806 <-- Blog post about the problem Salmon is meant to solve.

http://groups.google.com/group/salmon-protocol <--The Google Group for people working on the project. Rather technical.

Comments

[holyschist]

They already knew (and had it pointed out to them by about 50 people), but I they still see this as somehow different from authenticated RSS, which already exists and may even be used by some of their own readers (perhaps they understand this and see it as fundamentally different from an online authenticated RSS feeder; I don't personally see how a meaningful distinction can be drawn). I dunno. Seriously, the only way to get full control is to host it yourself.

This sort of thing comes up EVERY TIME RSS is discussed anywhere, as far as I can tell. For something "really simple," it's pretty confusing to a lot of people.

[charmian]

Yeah, this proves that a lot of people REALLY don't understand what RSS is. It is possible using WP or whatever to kill RSS/ATOM (though people can still do screenscrapes), but with LJ, you don't have that control. People don't get that if the RSS feed is on, that they are ALREADY broadcasting their data.

[holyschist]

Programming-wise, this is different from RSS, but the functional access to your LJ? I don't really think it's different.

Meh. But I also find this "Oh noes, people will be lurkers" thing baffling. Yeah, I don't often click through and leave comments on feeds. I DO on crossposts, especially if I can see how many comments are at the other site (which I can't with, say, Blogger feeds). I don't think my reading/commenting behavior is super-weird. (And there are people on both my reading lists whose posts I rarely comment on! Is it important to comment on X/Y of someone's entries to not be a "voyeur"?)

[matgb]

He has, apparently, turned his feed down to minimal, as a response to me pointing out it was all there.

And even after having been told, repeatedly, that authenticated feeds exist, he still thinks the RSS feed doesn't contain private stuff.

He may have some valid points about privacy, but he's making them so badly it doesn't make any sense, and he's not actually responding to what he's being told :-(

I do think that someone with the feed set to minimum should have that respected, simply because that's consistent, but I also think people who set the feed to minimum are being daft (for the most part, those with privacy concerns for their personal content get a pass).

[torachan]

I think after reading all those comments that it's really just "I hate DW" dressed up in concerns about privacy and stealing content zomg.

[yvi]

Yeah, after the second reply to me, that was the same impression as got. Only thing left for me to do was to reply with "Okay!"

But I am snarky like that ;)

[janinedog]

I got that impression, too, especially since his/her original complaint was that with this feature, people would be less likely to comment on his/her stuff. When that part was debunked, it turned into something totally different.

[charmian]

LOL, well, if he doesn't have his basic facts down, then I don't think his points are completely valid. I think he simply really doesn't understand RSS at all.

I agree. Out of curiosity though, is it even possible for DW to not respect the feed? In other words, if it is set to minimum, my limited understanding is that even if DW chose to ignore their wishes, it wouldn't be possible to pull the data anyway, since it wouldn't exist in the RSS feed.

Never mind, I just read Mark's comment on the news post about how the mechanism they're going to use isn't authenticated RSS.

[pne]

It will [...] be updated every 60 min

*at most* every 60 minutes.

As I understand it, each time you load your reading page, DW checks whether it's been more than 60 minutes since it last collected off-site entries and if so, goes and fetches them.

So if you only load your DW reading page twice a day, then external sites only get polled twice a day. On the other hand, if you load your DW reading page twice a *second*, then external sites only get polled 24 times a day.

(This also means, as Mark says, that if you're following so many people on - say - LJ that they post more than 100 entries together in between whenever you load your reading page, you're going to miss entries. So don't load your DW reading page once every other week if you have lots of posting-happy other-site friends.)

[matgb]

So if you only load your DW reading page [any page on DW] twice a day, then external sites only get polled twice a day

From what I understand, it checks every time you're active on DW in some way, and if it hasn't polled for over an hour it'll poll.

But yes, not as good for those of us with active friends on LJ. Especially not if, as Janine implies, that reading filters won't work--I have a filter on LJ especially for high frequency linkbloggers who sometimes post ten times an hour, I only ever read them on the filter as they swamp everything else.

Ah well, either they'll iron out the details or I'll keep using my LJ filters as well--can't afford paid account currently anyway, hopefully that'll change soon but...

[pne]

From what I understand, it checks every time you're active on DW in some way, and if it hasn't polled for over an hour it'll poll.

I was going by Mark's second bullet point:

We will only download new entries every 60 minutes (this may change). This means that, when you view your reading page on Dreamwidth, we only contact remote sites every ~60 minutes to ask for new entries. (emphasis mine)

Though it's quite possible I jumped to conclusions since he didn't specifically say that polling checks only happened on reading page load.

[matgb]

See, I just searched through all the comments to find where I'd read that, then reread the post. Mark;'s last bullet point:

We only download entries while you're browsing the site. In short, whenever you view a page on Dreamwidth (any page), we will update your reading page with remote entries if it's been more than an hour.

Which works for me.

[pne]

Ah! OK. Must have skipped that bit.

Thanks for pointing me to the horse's mouth.

[yvi]

Sounds a bit strange to me (pulling my reading page when I am only surfing the stats page, or something), but okay with me. Especially as I am not planning on using it anytime soon :)

[matgb]

I think it'll only be doing it if you sign up to it, but for me, given I have a fairly busy LJ friends page, if it doesn't poll regularly, it'll almost certainly miss stuff.

While I may only update my reading page irregularly, if I'm active, odds are I'll be commenting and replying throughout the day, so it makes sense to me, anyway.

[janinedog]

From what I remember of Mark's demo of the feature to me (he showed me a half-working version of it about a week ago), posts were not actually associated with accounts, because the only real option is to associate them with OpenID accounts, which means changing the code on half the site to allow OpenID users to have/control entries (since it's assumed now that they cannot). And since the content won't even be visible to anyone except the reader, that's more logic to put in there if it's associated with an OpenID account (to show it to them, too). And since it's only around for 2 weeks anyway, doesn't seem like it's worth it really.

But, obviously anything can change at this point. I agree that allowing the imported entries to be filtered by user would be very useful. And I may not even be fully understanding how it's working at this point either, so don't take my word for it. :)