All your status belong to us!  For quite a while I have been intrigued by the p2theme theme from the folks at Automattic.  It also bothered me that all these status updates, were stored on twitter’s servers and at the whim of the twitterverse.   This past weekend, something happened that changed everything.  Wordpress decided to adopt the RSS Cloud protocol so that all word press blogs would be cloud enabled for a real time feed.

I talked to some of our developers and immediately we got to work on connecting a p2theme blog, status.jpmaxman.com, to my twitter feed.  It worked brilliantly.  Now, I can do all my status updates on my p2theme blog and they will instantly make it over to twitter.  From there I have a conduit to facebook & friend feed.  But, the origin feed, the master feed if you will, exists on my server and the content stays with me.  Should twitter get acquired and start inserting massive ads or get driven into the ground, I still have my status history.  In addition, as more and more services adopt the cloud feed, people can actually just subscribe to my conduit.  It can be a 100% peer to peer distributed twitter.  Dave Winer has been on a soap box about this for some time, and I’ve always agreed with him.  The Internet is meant to be distributed!

After thinking about this some more, I realized this goes way beyond status updates.  Any site – in particular news sites which we happen to run – could benefit greatly from a cloud feed conduit into other social media.  This conduit could update twitter feeds, facebook profile or fan pages, etc.  As stories are published to the news site they could instantly be syndicated to any number of places across the Internet.  As such, I decided to register: instafeed.net and put a public face to this.

We will be setting it up as an open source project and will be soliciting any help we can get in building this out.  Right now we are working on some top level architecture schemes as well as improving the core for an initial launch that will essentially just be RSS Cloud to twitter.

This is one of those projects that two weeks ago I would have never thought I’d be this deep into.  But, the pieces just kept coming together and it was too tempting to not see where it lead.  Contact me if you are interested in getting involved!