Microblogs Need GUIDs
Posted on August 18, 2008
Filed Under programming |
I’m listening to the 8/2/2008 episode of the Gillmor Gang where Steve is talking with Dustin Sailings of Twitterspy. As they are talking about Twitter and Identi.ca and such, a realization hit me. Because I know nothing about how any of these microblogs are implemented this might be naive and redundant but let me throw it out there.
Microblogs absolutely need GUIDs. Particularly if we are talking about federating together identi.ca powered services that exchange messages, it is highly important that we be able to uniquely identify them. Since every microblog post originated somewhere, I believe this GUID should almost always be the URL of the individual message on the originating service.
For example, I make a tweet on Twitter. FriendFeed picks that up and aggregates that in my feed. That FriendFeed message should have a GUID that is the original Twitter URL. If I have a ping.fm or TwitterFeed or any other reposting type service running, they should all pass in the GUID as they do the push from Twitter to other services. If I post originally to Identi.ca and it pushes to Twitter, just reverse that notion. Then in cases like where your blog automatically posts messages to Twitter, the GUID should be the permalink of your blog post. This would enable easy deduplication. For example, now FriendFeed could see that the Twitter notification of the blog post is something it has already seen from the blog itself. It can only show a single occurrence, not the avalanche of duplicate messages we now see.
The same basic principle would hold with Flickr entries that get posted to Twitter or similar services. Use the Flickr page as the GUID so that it is easy to tell that the notification from Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed are all the same thing so whatever interface you are using should show it only once. I think the benefits of this fall out very quickly. This seems like it would be simple to add in if it doesn’t already exist, simple to add to every bit of message flow and simple to use at all the user interface ends. If the idea is that in the future these services will be distributed and federated, this sort of thing should happen sooner rather than later.
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Comments
2 Responses to “Microblogs Need GUIDs”
On FriendFeed, this post was liked by 6 people and commented on 11 times hide-
Yes. This. This would fix the deluge of duplicates I'm seeing as people start pushing out the same stuff via twenty different services.
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It's just such a simple concept, presumably with a simple implementation, and it could make everything so much better. Imagine a preference in FriendFeed that was "Don't show duplicate items", and then you only ever see any item once regardless what service it originated from and was pushed to.
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Dave -- It could also merge discussions for identical items. Which could be amazing.
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I know from tinkering with the API that all FF entries have GUIDs. But besides FF originated posts, it comes a little too late in the pipeline.
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Paul -- Most things have guids (in the sense that they're globally unique identifiers). Every blog post, twitter update, flickr set, etc. has a globally unique URL. i don't think it would be too difficult to start matching based on that.
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True, and I hadn't considered that. Even within a single service, commenting on a FriendFeed flicker comment could collapse with comments on the Twitter auto-post about it. That would be a huge win.
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The GUID idea would help, and many providers do have them. However, the GUIDs are useless without everyone conforming to the "original source". For example, a blog post has one GUID but the Google Reader share has a different one. Having GoogleReader or even a share on FriendFeed use the same GUID as the original blog post would be awesome, but in some cases we cannot easily get the source GUID.
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Rob -- Yeah. There's definitely some work there (mostly in the getting all the different services to agree to do the same thing). Though even with Google Reader, the title of the post in Reader is the URL back to the original (or, in some cases, through FeedBurner). So I think it could still be sniffed out in a lot of cases.
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Mark Pilgrim had some good thoughts on this back when they were working on the intiial Atom spec: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/28/howto-atom-id
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There are two big issues at play here: The existence of GUIDs and the propagations/preservation of GUIDs. At the very least, all the things consuming RSS/Atom feeds should preserve the GUID from the feed. Google Reader and FriendFeed should not mint new ones for items that come in with existing ones. Step 2 is getting them to use the URI for each item as the GUID.
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Good luck ... some blogging services can't even seem to get GUID's in RSS feeds
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There is talk of a microblogging summit…Myrtle Beach perhaps.
Robert, I’d show up but I ain’t organizing nothing. I’m barely keeping my head above water with the projects I do have, much less with extra ones.