I love the Twitter service, but it’s really all about the people that I connect with.  So when Twitter’s technical issues prevent me from talking with my online friends, I’ve often thought that there might be better ways to communicate.  I developed OpenMB earlier this year.  Although it isn’t finished, I was able to create a prototype that would allow people to communicate in a distributed system.  The problem with OpenMB is that it is a new application that needs to be perfected and adopted.  I’ve been thinking about easier alternatives.

The solution that I’m going to describe in this post may be superior to OpenMB in a lot of ways.  It uses existing standards for communicating between blogs.  In this solution, pingbacks are the open standard used for a distributed microblogging platform.

Posting

To post a Pingback Message (PM), you must have an account on a Hub Pingback Server (HPS).  Each account will have the ability to post a Pingback Message (PM) from his or her own blog.    The HPS is just another blog with the capacity to accept and store all of the PMs that are generated by its members. 

 

Reading

Each member of an HPS will subscribe to an RSS feed.  Each feed will be uniquely defined for the subscriber.  This means that the subscriber will determine which member’s PMs appear in his or her feed.  Additionally, a PM publisher will have the ability to Block specific subscribers from receiving his or her PMs.

 

Pingback Message Contents

A PM is simply a blog post.  I have identified the elements below using WordPress field names:

post_title = Content of the message.  This will probably be restricted to 140 characters in keeping with current standards.

post_content = [anchor text with link to Hub Pingback Server] | [HPS Username] | [HPS Secret] | [In-Reply-To URL]

 

Subscribing to Multiple Hubs

People can register with multiple Hub Pingback Servers and subscribe to the posts from each server.  The user can choose to create a combined RSS feed, allowing them to read all PMs in a single stream.

 

Challenges

There are a few challenges ahead in implementing Pingback Messaging:

1. Feed Subscriptions – Subscribing to multiple Hub Pingback Servers and creating combined feeds will be cumbersome for the user.  A process will need to be developed to make that easier.
2. Text Messaging interfaces – The initial focus is to provide communication across the web, however, there are many text-messaging plugins for blogs and RSS feeds.  It should not be difficult to add those features to this solution.
3. The Unknown –
   • How many users can a single HPS support? 
   • Will other blogging platforms support PMs (the entire message must fit in title)?
   • How will we offer users the ability to discover people across servers?
   • Should direct messages be supported, or was that just a nice feature of Twitter that doesn’t need replicating? 

Moving Forward

I have implemented a working prototype in WordPress.  It is currently a simple template that could be copied to any WordPress installation.  Very soon, I will be able to unveil the code for your consideration and suggestions for improvement.