Toward Portable Discussion Services

By Jon Udell

May 4, 2001

(The First Mass Web Extinction :  Page 2 of 4 )

In this Article

The First Mass Web Extinction Toward Portable Discussion Services The RSS Fiasco Lessons Learned

QuickTopic enabled me to discuss, with readers of the report, the fate of TimeDance. But when QuickTopic's creator, Steve Yost, read John's essay, he thought about the transience of all Web services and posted this reply:

Steve Yost:

A friend alerted me to this thread. I was amazed by the way eCircles went dark, and Zaplets has changed its model, both saying essentially "please copy and paste to save your data."

I plan for QuickTopic to be around a good long while, but to assuage users' fears, it would be great if we Web apps at least provided a rich means for users to capture their data. I'd like to let users download entire threads as XML files (surprisingly, nobody has explicitly asked for this). Let's pick a standard for thread archiving and do it. I'd like to hear from other Web app providers about this.

Yes, by all means, let's have such standardization. I've built a few discussion converters in my day -- from NNTP to various Web formats, and vice versa. It would be easy to represent the basic objects (a message, a thread) in XML. Why aren't users demanding this? It's a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Users won't demand that one discussion service export XML until they can see that other discussion services will import it. In this particular case, though, I don't think we need or want to crank up a W3C-style standards process. We just need Steve and a few of his colleagues who maintain other Web-based discussion services to agree on a format.

While they're at it, I'd love to see them agree on a handful of XML-RPC and/or SOAP APIs -- just the basic primitives needed to navigate a message base, and post messages. Currently, these services hardwire the features they support into the user interfaces they express through HTML.

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