"Birdfeeder is the prototype implementation of a RESTful, interoperable, Internet-scale microblogging protocol, tentatively called FETHR (Featherweight Entangled Timelines over HTTP Requests)." - Chris Messina from Mento

Everyone writing these protocols need to get together and decide on the benefits of each and come to decision on a single standard. It seems all these different protocols are distracting from each other. - Jesse Stay

I think competing projects like this are generally beneficial to the cause. The community will decide on it eventually. - Meryn Stol

That is, Birdfeeder vs OpenMicroBlogging. - Meryn Stol

loks like a lot of POSTs and very few GETs. basically ignores caching. - MikeAmundsen

Jesse: As long as the different proposals are exploring different solutions then it's healthy. The OMB folks are mostly on Identica but they're aware of BirdFeeder. - Adewale Oshineye

Is there a spec in there somewhere? - Dave Winer

If you mean for OMB then 0.1: http://openmicroblogging.org/protoco... and 0.2 is currently in progress: http://gitorious.org/project... If you mean BirdFeeder then the guy behind it hasn't had time to do that yet. He does have running code though. - Adewale Oshineye

Jesse, when you say "all these protocols" do you have any in mind other than OMB and FETHR? - Michael R. Bernstein

Dave: The spec is a moving target; I'm working on it, still shaking out some details of the gossip protocol. — Mike: It's a push protocol. I don't ask you for news, you tell me news. What's to cache? - Daniel Sandler

Also: I'm aware of OMB, and I like the look of 0.2. But FETHR takes a fundamentally different approach to authentication; by securing objects rather than channels, FETHR allows objects to be shared/redistributed (avoiding a microblogging version of the RSS Bandwidth Problem™). I'll write up this design point soon, probably in a dsandler.org post. - Daniel Sandler

intrigued by what's being tackled by fethr, especially gossip as a scaling solution (related to the obscenely popular) and how micro-messaging is only a sample application of the protoco(s). - sull

conjuring up the notion of users "joining" and the why/where of their point of entry. i can sort of see it similar to ISP provided email service... where you can use a gateway to this micro-messaging utility. maybe a website would sprout that manages all these gateways so a user can easily begin based on some type of criteria (ISP, Geo-Location, Content Niche etc). Of course, ideally you would have Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle etc all provide their gateway to this open interoperable micro-messaging utility as well... making it a seamless experience, even integrated with web-based email (gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail). - sull

also realizing that google could provide a simple UI enhancement to gmail 'compose message' allowing you to effectively post a public short message that can be sent out to a cluster of delivery and storage handlers. hell, maybe this piggybacks on SMTP afterall or just bring back and FIX the issues with open mail relay ;) - sull