I am no longer publishing content to my App.net account until I can syndicate my content to their service without writing a single line of code.
I should not have to write custom code to publish to App.net. App.net should be able to pull in content from my own site using my Atom/hAtom feeds, receiving real-time updates I send via PubSubHubbub.
Background
Back in August, @brennannovak wrote an interesting post about app.net. Overall, he was very optimistic about the project, for many of the reasons most people are. (App.net's tagline is "We are selling our product, NOT our users.") At the bottom of his post, he asked @dalton to promise a few things in regards to interoperability with other systems supporting web standards.
In Dalton's response to Brennan Novak, he publicly stated that App.net will support the following things:
- Activitystrea.ms Atom & JSON feeds
- PubSubHubbub (PuSH) support (as a publisher, initially)
- Exposing user identities with Webfinger
- Support open-source clients
- Support users in building inbound and outbound syndication to and from App.net
The beginning of the disappointment
I understand development takes a long time, and I'm not asking Dalton to build all of this immediately. But ever since the project successfully raised funding, I haven't seen much improvement in supporting an open web. Instead, they've create a proprietary API not based on any existing standards, and have not added support for open standards.
App.net should be a distribution platform, not a microblogging service
I don't need another microblogging service to write content in and build another social network graph. I don't see the value of having yet another place to build a "friends" list.
What I would like to do, however, is to leverage social networks as distribution platforms for content created elsewhere. You see this all the time, people share links to things on these networks. More and more, people are using Twitter as way to just share links. They act as distribution hubs rather than a place where you create content.
Facebook has been doing a great job of showing inline previews of content before you click through to the link, and even Twitter launched Twitter Cards as a way to show a preview of linked content within their timeline.
As a distribution platform, these services like Twitter, Facebook and App.net are great. They allow people to find people whose content they are interested in, and easily subscribe to it. It's a central place people can go to get updates from their friends without having to visit a bunch of individual blogs. Sound familiar? It's all the same benefits RSS feed readers promised years ago!
Where distribution platforms can add value
I publish my short notes on my site, in HTML at aaronparecki.com/notes. Naturally I don't expect everyone to go look at that page all the time. I expect people to discover my content through distribution platforms.
Overcoming the network effect
Publishing my own content is only as useful as the number of people I have reading it. Rather than try to get a bunch of people to subscribe to my RSS feed, I can leverage these distribution platforms to syndicate my content to a wider audience.
Speed
At scale, a service dedicated to distribution of content can do a far better job of delivering content to many subscribers than my own site. This is one of the reasons behind the architecture of PubSubHubbub, where a Hub is a different system from the Publisher, and its only role is to push content to Subscribers.
Different platforms can compete on speed of delivery. I would expect some platforms could charge more for real-time delivery to a guaranteed number of subscribers, where other free ones may not have a guarantee.
Analytics
Another way distribution platforms can add value is by providing analytics. Twitter is already doing this to a certain extent by showing the number of "retweets" and "favorites" a tweet gets. Some RSS services like Feedburner provided analytics to publishers such as showing the number of people subscribing to the feed.
Supporting the Indie Web
Services like App.net should be like plumbing in your house. I can swap out copper pipes for plastic pipes any time I want, and the person upstairs using the faucet won't know the difference. Both pipes get the job done, to move water from one place to another.
If App.net is truly a valuable service, then they will excel at one of the value-adds that distribution platforms can provide. If this happens, I will enjoy using their service over anyone else's because of the features where they add value.
As a publisher of content on my own domain, I already provide hooks for people to read my content several different ways. I have a web page with a list of recent notes marked up using Microformats, an RSS feed that can be subscribed to in a feed reader, and I send a ping to a PuSH Hub when new content is posted, allowing anyone to get this content in real time.
That said, I fully understand very few people will actually find my content this way. More likely they will find the link I publish to Twitter, Facebook, and possibly Hackernews. These services are currently easier to use and will likely continue to be easier to use than RSS readers, which is why distribution hubs can still be a critical component of an open, independent web.
The Challenge to App.net
I should not have to write custom code to publish my content to App.net. Instead, they should consume my PuSH-enabled feed and automatically create a new post on my App.net account based on the content I create on my site.
App.net has a great opportunity to be a major player in the Indie Web. If App.net truly wants to support an open web, they need to commit to using existing open standards, and not require people to custom-build code to use their platform.
I would also like to personally challenge @dalton to participate in IndieWebCamp 2013 in Portland in June, or in Brighton in September.
