In search of THE twitter protocol to RULE them all

Here I am at the first WarbleCamp (a barcamp style twitter unconference) in the heart of the Guardian’s offices in Kings Cross.

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I’ve always been interested in protocols and find them really coool, useful & helpful. So for my first warblecamp session I decided to call out for a discussion on creating a twitter:// protocol – why do I see this as important, and what does it mean ?

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Here is my use case for how a standard twitter protocol would work. A web page would have a link embedded within the HTML such as an @username or a call to action page which might be a petition site wanting you to tweet a link with a fixed hashtag.

The normal flow of events are that the link would POST the message to twitter.com ; firstly you would be required to authenticate on twitter.com and then you would be forwarded on to your twitter page, with the message appearing in the posting box.

A pre-requisite in this would be to encode the message in the url which would take on the form :

http://twitter.com/home?status=<encoded message>

Wouldn’t it be great IF – there was one single twitter:// protocol that would communicate with an application on my computer, that i’ve already authenticated and i’m happy/comfortable using.

This would mean app developers would need to adopt the protocol with their own apps behaviour, but it woud allow all kinds of interaction with clients and quick / easy interaction with twitter platform, not matter if you are on a desktop or a mobile.

Here is a quick flow of how I think it might work.

twitter-protocol

The biggest challenge I believe is at step 3 where the user has to set / select which registered application to use, could this be a system preference, could it be sniffed out with javascript, the user needs control over it, but it would/should act a bit like browser selectors, maybe its all driven via something like @anywhere and the choice of apps are shown via javascript links … lots of ideas and questions, but I’d like app developers and twitter developers interested in seeing this happen to engage in a conversation to see if we can make this happen.

Message me on twitter @ketan to continue this discussion OR reply to the post below, and lets see if we can make this happen. I will expand some further ideas on the flow above in a future post.

Thanks @raffi for talking through this idea with me at WarbleCamp this morning !

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3 Responses to “In search of THE twitter protocol to RULE them all”

  1. Also check https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Web-based_protocol_handlers
    You could register “twitter” protocol to be used with an web api, at least for prototyping the thing on Firefox.

  2. But do we need double-slash after colon? even Tim Berners-Lee regrets it, see http://nyti.ms/4gCp9s

    • Ket says:

      Yes I agree, we could probably remove it.

      I see a few things that are necessary:

      A list of some common actions the protocol will need to handle, we could experiment with the mozilla registration, and perhaps set up a little test to see how that works, if we have some solid structure twitter.com may well use it as a basis to move forward with.

      My key challenge I see here is that the desktop will need to know what a registered, preferred client is, on macs, some app like Choosy might work, OR if the application when installed can register with the browser, how would this work on a PC and how would it work across multiple browsers.

      I’m no desktop developer – but there must be a way that skype has done this .. I think its an exciting prospect.

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