Hueniverse

Putting XRDS-Simple in Context

What are we trying to do?

XRDS-Simple is a protocol for service discovery. The level of discovery is kept intentionally simple to accommodate existing use cases and apply established patterns. Service discovery at this level is technically trivial. After all, how hard can it be to list a bunch of URIs and add some descriptions next to each one? The only issue is agreeing on some format that everyone can understand and implement. In developing a discovery protocol, we are trying to answer two questions:

1. How to find information about a resource through its URI?
2. What format is this information provided in?

Announcing XRDS-Simple 1.0 Draft 1

I’m happy to announce that XRDS-Simple 1.0 Draft 1 was released today. What started as an appendix to OAuth Discovery, quickly found life of its own in the form of a generic and simple-to-implement discovery protocol for web services. The specification is more about an editorial review of existing standards than an invention of something new, but written to remove the need to study other specifications. For more detail on XRDS-Simple check the post about XRDS-Simple in Context.

Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part II

When discussing microblogging scalability, the conversation includes scaling each individual service, but also scaling the network and relationship between services. Part I discussed the challenges of scaling a single microblogging site with focus on dealing with a large and constantly changing content database. In that post I mentioned that the proposal by some critics to build a distributed or federated microblogging service as a scaling solution will actually make thing worse. This second part will elaborate on that claim.

When discussing a distributed microblogging service, the conversation touches the long debate on the future of social networks and linking communities across individual walled gardens. After all, microblogging is one aspect of the social web, and status updates lives side by side sharing photos, videos, and other personal information and experiences. Being able to choose a social network and make friends from another without having to sign up for multiple accounts is one of the visions being offered. Another is the approach being advocated by the Data Portability group, which focuses on being able to move an entire experience off to another network instead, creating multiple identities.

Scaling a Microblogging Service - Part I

When it comes to Twitter, everyone’s a critic.

The irony is, the majority of the technical criticism written about Twitter reveals more about the lack of understanding of the author than anything about Twitter. Creating Nouncer - a developer platform for building microblogs and similar services - provides a firsthand understanding of the inner-working and challenges of microblogging sites. This post is not specifically about Twitter but as the leading microblogging service, it is the best working example of the challenges of scaling in the space.

People don’t seem to get what is so hard about scaling the Twitter service. Some think it has to do with Rails, while others look at the hosting company or other operating factors. Then there are those who incorrectly think a distributed or federated service is the solution (which will only make things worse). The idea that building a large scale web application is trivial or a solved problem is simply ridiculous. In a way it is surprising that there are so few companies out there dealing with commoditizing web developing scaling.