Liminal Existence

This post is for people who want to be able to subscribe to private feeds, or people who want to be able to communicate from one site to another using webhooks. I've talked a number of times on the subject at various conferences, but haven't posted publicly about the approach.

Thankfully, it's simple. You can see the whole thing here, in this nice set of slides:

Or, you can look at this diagram that illustrates the protocol flow. Note that all the curl commands needed to make a secure, private connection are included in the diagram.

The goal is to allow crypto-less communication across sites while retaining a familiar user experience. This approach achieves that, I think. What do you think?

London's not a clean city, as anyone who's ever spent more than a day there knows very well. The black crap that builds up in your nose after a tube-heavy day is one of London's most striking features to the new visitor, and apparently it's not getting any better.

There's probably an opportunity here:

"The only way to get authors and publishers to embrace this device is to sell 20,000,000 of them. You either become the best and only platform for consuming books worth buying or you fail. And the only way to create that footprint in the face of an iPad is to make it so cheap to buy and use it's irresistible." — Seth Godin

 This statement is total bollocks. If there's only going to be one best and only platform for consuming books, it's not going to be some chintzy app made by Apple or Amazon and without meaningful social features. If there's only going to be one best and only platform, it's not going to be a DRM solution, unless something's changed and DRM is now suddenly viable for books where it wasn't for movies and music.

If there's going to be one best and only platform for consuming books, it's going to be the web. The reality is more complicated, of course, and we'll probably have as many platforms for reading books as we do types of paper. Those platforms will also have learned from the internet, unlike Seth's suggestions (which are good nonetheless).