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So has your opinion about WordPress changed now Robert, or you think that you were a bit at fault too, for not having backed up your blog?
That's that only downside of self hosted WordPress blogs, you have to stay updated and make sure your stuff is backed up. But with this new rssCloud concept coming into play, I think RSS would really pick up and speed up the flow of information on the web, making it much more real-time.
Very much looking forward to this. As a matter of fact, to check how this works I'm going to install the rssCloud Wordpress plugin, which would let even self hosted blogs to push information out, real-time.
Will keep you posted how this works.
Two things Twitter, Inc needs to do:
1. Start saving a heck of a lot more than a week's worth of our stuff
2. Allow us all to save a backup of our accounts, tweets, followers, followees, RTs, interactions etc to our local HD, in case the worst happens. If and when it does, we should be given a restore option. (Twitter is likely doing this anyway, but I'd rather have the facility to do it myself, too.)
The value on Twitter isn't in that one tweet you wrote, which anyone can repeat in a few seconds - it's in our accounts. WP backups work because you can easily get your stuff back on WP. Even if it's just a crude cut-and-paste and backdate. You can't do that on Twitter. Moreover, while it was bad that you lost a couple of months of posts Robert, using RSS you can easily restore that, and your actual blog, and your identity, weren't impacted (significantly). If the same thing had happened on Twitter, you'd be stuffed. It wouldn't matter where you were saving up your tweets.
No matter how good an idea it sounds - and I think it makes sense on every level - a backup is effectively useless until Twitter themselves get involved.
i kind of agree with the CNN example.
CNN is already ingrained in everyone's mind.
They can afford to transfer brandability in return for social media penetration and turnkey info architecture (albeit not the greatest ;).
They are leveraging. It doesnt matter if CNN comes in the form of a preceding "@" or "twitter.com".
As long as it is their somewhere it's all good for them.
Type CNN in your browsers address bar. just CNN. you go right to their site. In google, cnn.com is the first listing. on twitter, cnn.com is linked over on the right not to mention that almost every tweet has a link to their site.
You are right that CNN could benefit from a complete searchable backup accessible from their own site (or a special twitter service). At the same time, they can be automatically cross-tweeting to their own database creating an archive of short messages. They don't need twitter to help them do this since the API allows for it. And likewise, an RSS feed can be used to populate a database as mentioned already.
To do it in scalable manner, I would look into MarkXML - http://www.marklogic.com
And their awesome example of a searchable mailing list archive at http://www.markmail.org
so... backing those tweets up is not valuable. capturing click-through data is.
and that's why the topic of short tracker urls has been hot lately.
twitter and bit.ly hold the gold on that front.
having that data is what matters. thats why cnn and everyone should use their own urls if possible.
bit.ly gives access to the data but not all of it. might as well own it yourself and work on interpretive value.
another notion is good old email.
in the context of sending "tweets" - this screenshot speaks to the backup issue - http://go.vocal.ly/24
They both basically do the same thing, and in roughly the same way (as far as I can tell from my experiments so far with Pubsubhubbub, and reading about rssCloud).
If you see in this scenario, ID has the backing of WordPress, which is the biggest name in Blog Hosting and Disqus is on its own.
But when you observe the overall scenario, Disqus has been more innovative and adaptive compared to ID and has been rewarded in form of being used on many major blogs, giving it tremendous exposure.
So you see, if rssCloud is innovative and performs better than the rival product, it would come out as a winner. Its not like, Google has the hand of Midas - It also has had its share of failed products.
I just want to see both these products launch well, in the end, the bloggers would have a tremendous benefit and RSS would be restored to its previous glory!
Maybe it'll more be down to the innovation that occurs AROUND the technologies. Though again, any innovation applied to one can be applied to another with hardly any effort.
But what's the point in CNN creating it's own Twitter. CNN is news business. Infact Twitter should take care of past tweets. Twitter should provide archive and it can give a search option if you'd like to search from tweets older than let's say 3 months. That way Twitter will have less load on it's servers.
CNN does not need to build Twitter, it just needs to back up all tweets, that can be done by RSS. CNN then can provide a search on its backed up tweets. So when someone searches for olders CNN tweets, Google can give back the results. So no need of Twitter search either. All CNN has to do is just keep ready a page with all its previous tweets at one place. Job done!
But may be that's not what Twitter care right now. Twitter is real time and may be that's why it doesn't care so much about the past tweets. Or may be they'll have to do it soon. I think they should.
But as of now, I'm in love with RSS!
So where's the link to the RSS->BlogThis utility? I know somebody wrote one!!
RSS lives! Hurray!
Just a suggestion
Wordpress has a P2 skin that allows you to essentially create your own Twitter locally with a Wordpress.org site.
Combine that with real-time RSS and anyone, with almost no technical expertise, can build their own Twitter using Wordpress and use RSS to route it in real time to any service, including Twitter. (I think Zee already does this.)
It seems like Wordpress has been planing on providing an alternative to Twitter for a while now, the P2 template has been out for 5 months. It makes private "Twitter" pages, exactly like you're talking about, already an easy reality for anyone who wants them.
We're working on BackupMyBlog as well...
Yep, RSS... Totally useless, and so, like, passé... Certainly, the thousands (or tens of thousands) of feeds that stream through the average blogger's reader are also useless and inefficient.
Sorry. When all the social media whoring is over, and the twitter wars are finished; the empty space (where blog posts go) will still be waiting. And readers will still be using RSS... Unfortunately, having spent there time on tweets, twitters won't have much to say—or they will have forgotten how to write.
Re: back-up... if Twitter were to go down, where d'you reckon people would resort to for news? CNN.com wouldn't be a bad bet!
And re: branding: if CNN don't say "Twitter" in their comms then all those people they're trying to get in front of simply wouldn't know the messages were easy for them to get. And CNN aren't gifting brand power here; they do News, Twitter do distribution of 140 char. messages. They're not competitors, so why not collaborate?
Sure, Twitter might turn against CNN, or any of the content providers that use it... that's Twitter's risk though - I think they're clever enough to realise how pissed off their users would be if they did stuff like that.
Anyway, the rest of your post was - as usual - great! It's exciting how much stuff is getting backed up without us having to think about it...... which I think is the major point. Humans don't naturally back stuff up. We like to exist in the moment. That's why we do stuff like forget to back up our blog histories! Personally, I can't wait 'til I never have to think about back-up again.
Thinking of stuff twice is a waste!