Twitter has been providing a steady stream of updates over XMPP in past. This firehose was being used by many applications on internet. It was a pretty useful stream of updates, but managing it was a infrastructural nightmare.Twitter’s frequent downtimes have been very well documented, part due to blogosphere’s soft corner for twitter, and part due to its own inability to address the problem in time. There have been many after effects of these frequent downtimes and the enormous buzz thy used to create in media. The remedial plan included many cutbacks, one of which was limited access of firehose to developers. Many startups had to close shops due to this differential treatment.

The lucky few having access to firehose are google, bing adn others, which is understandable as they bring traffic to twitter. But all developers deserve a fair chance to access the api and build apps.

Considering that all who have access to firehose are considerably bigger and technologically capable entities, they should further distribute the firehose using their own resources. Although XMPP has scale issues, but distribution can be a chain where an entity is responsible to distribute to n other entities, and all these entities further distribute it to others. In short, whomsoever uses the firehose, distributes it further through XMPP. This will help to get the burden off the twitter infrastructure and at the same time provide access to multiple developers.

This infrastructure sharing paradigm has worked wonders in past in open source community by setting up mirrors at different universities and corporations. They used to serve static files through ftp/http. This has been a proven distribution model and can be further evolved to serve semantic content. XMPP proxies are not tough to setup. XMPP is already a well known distributed platform and the piece of software to facilitate such registration and distribution is not very tough to build.

Twitter has already announced its will to share the firehose with developers again in early 2010. By enforcing the sharing constraints, it can easily start an example, which might fuel content sharing in future.

This video was doing rounds on facebook since iPad launch. Pretty accurate subtitle sync. The scene is from movie “Der Untergang“, popularly known as “The Downfall” in english. I saw this movie around 2 years back with english subtitles.

The hilarious parody clip is not a new effort to attract audience on an issue. The same clip has been previously subtitle-synced to cover the following on a lighter note.

1. Blu-Ray has won against HD-DVD.
2. Sarah Palin has resigned.
3. Chelsea lost a match.
4. Modern warfare 2 is too pricey.
5. An almost 20 other vids……..

Youtube is loaded with these clips. But the iPad one is the best of all.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fictional Hitler airs real iPad complaints (seattlepi.com)
• Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Won Massachusetts Senate Seat (dvorak.org)
• Hitler Is Not Happy With Marvel’s Return Policy (mmcelhaney-media.blogspot.com)
• Video: Hitler Is Not Pleased About Facebook’s Acquisition Of FriendFeed (techcrunch.com)
• Even Internet Hitler hates Kanye West (msnbc.msn.com)
• Director Of The Hitler Downfall Movie Likes The Hundreds Of Parody Clips (techdirt.com)

I was reading Adam L. Penenberg’s Viral Loop since last 3 weeks. In last few years, Viral, perhaps is fastest-to-become-a-cliche word. Every second self styled social scientist tech czar must have mentioned it countless times.

Adam has been doing some writing assignments for Ning sometime back. The article was published for fast company, and can be read here. Adam continued working and finally published this book. (I did not know this initially. Ning was mentioned in the book for a painful number of times, which intrigued me into Adam’s Ning connection. Upon googling, i hit Andrew Chen’s review of this book. He has mentioned this fact in his review.)

Adam starts with defining viral paradigm by two examples, Ponzi schemes, and tupperware (perhaps the pioneer in viral marketing). After that first half of the book is dedicated to Mark Andreesson’s Mosaic, Netscape and ‘the’ Ning. Second half to Ebay, PayPal, Youtube, Facebook, Zynga and Twitter.

The book is mostly a history text with occasional one or two pages dedicated to analysis and some graphs and equations on the basis of analysis. It is best read skipping the analysis portions (arguably). The story portions are more informative and will really provide the kick (but most of it is also available on web in some form or the other. Wikipedia has most of it already).

Overall, if there was some less Ning in it, i would have liked it more. Ning is fine, but potraying it as the ultimate Web2.0 success, seems a bit far from reality.

Lately, Webaroo has announced that it has raised another round of funding through Charles River Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, Helion Venture Partners. Helion and CRV had participated in earlier round last year as well. It already has attracted a lot of media coverage, so i would not put much here.

Press coverage

• SMS network GupShup closes $12M round (venturebeat.com)
• India’s SMS GupShup Raises $12 Million For Twitter-Like Social Network (techcrunch.com)
• SMS GupShup Secures $12Million Additional Funding India’s Largest Social Network Plans Global Expansion (eon.businesswire.com)
• India’s Texting Community Provider SMS GupShup Raises $12 Million (contentsutra.com)