Delay intolerance

When it comes to writing, I impose on myself no particular deadline, a notion that results in a mostly stress-free frame of mind, but is also made that much more palatable by the fact that I've long since given up on being current and/or relevant. By extension, it should concern me not the time it takes to go from pushing the Publish button (or invoking an App Engine entity put) to, say, your feed reader; I write whenever, you read whenever, or never. Whatever.

But lo and behold, the time it takes for a message to enter the pipe and land on some other screen, is a concept to me that is inseparable with lag, followed by choke and Valve netcode, those jokers who have been griefing kids (myself included) before kids figured out they could grief each other.

If you also write online, chances are you're also interested in getting the word out as expediently as possible. Maybe you spam IRC or what not with a link to your post. Or you Twitter it. Maybe your content management system can even Twitter for you, but at any rate I know that for a while now, Wordpress can XML-RPC ping aggregators of your choosing. Back in the pre-acquisition days, pinging FeedBurner would get it to ping pretty much everyone else through PingShot.

So people have been doing this for a while, basically trying to push notifications and then getting everyone to poll the stuffing out of your site host. That's all there, today. All that's left is the online feed reader segment, who cling to such monolithic constructs as entries and long-form writing, as opposed to stream-of-consciousness type networks.

PubSubHubbub will bring stream-of-feeds to us old fogies, eventually. It already works with Google Reader Shared Items, so it's not much of a stretch to think that they won't bring real-time updates to Google Reader itself.

If you're interested and you're on a Wordpress install, it won't cost you anything more than another plugin. If you can't install plugins but you're on FeedBurner, just enable PingShot and everything is taken care of. For everyone else, there's always, uh, programming your own extension.

What on earth could this be used for? Probably just building a lower latency aggregator, but there's nothing wrong with a better mousetrap, is there?

Ride the Wave

So maybe PSHB is not the most exciting technology, not going to fundamentally change the way you write and publish. For that, there's Google Wave.

I haven't pitched shows or music or pretty much anything in a while, but I'm going to try to pitch you on the idea of integrating the Wave, whenever it comes out, with your writing process. This is not the same as your publishing process, for which there's already Twitter plugins and XML-RPC and PSHB already. No, integrate the Wave in your writing process and make it interactive.

• To create a post, create a Wave and mirror it on your destination page. Then let the world watch you write. Heck, the world may even help you out.
• Become a true "team-blog," or if you were already, make it easier to collaborate.
• Pursuant to the first point, let commenters leave comments at specific points in the post, and create running conversations at multiple sites.
• Something crazy like subtitle translation/editing.

As this site is really just some small-scale experiment (implemented on big-scale App Engine), I'm going to take a run at transitioning when public sign-ups are available. But realistically speaking, making this joint a real-time sandbox will likely change nothing for me. The ones who would immediately benefit from such a system are, honestly, episodic sites.

Well, episodic summaries first, and episodic reactions second. They stand to gain the most from instantaneous updates to a pretty large existing readership.

The knee-jerk reaction tells me that the population of episodic sites would go through the roof, but the converse may be true if people instead choose to congregate (and contribute!) around a few high-traffic sites. We'll probably know by the first half of 2010.