Sometimes I really wonder what runs through Dave Winer's mind. This afternoon, he's showing us "what Twitter messages look like in RSS". Umm, dude: Twitter does that now, as does FriendFeed. You can get an RSS feed of all the posts from any user with an unprotected stream. Here's mine.

Then there's this:

<guid> is the identifier for the message, so a reader can tell if they've seen it before. This makes it possible for the messages to be edited after publication, a common feature requests from writers using Twitter.

Sigh. Every element on Twitter has an ID now, and is being exported via RSS now. The lack of editing capability is a feature of Twitter, not a bug. Then there's this:

<link> is used to point to web pages. No need to shorten the URLs because they don't take up space in the 140 characters.

Except... the urls do take up space, since the full link still goes out (it's just not displayed by an HTML aware viewer). IIRC, the 140 character limit was mostly for "fitting to SMS limits". So sending a full href makes it worse, not better.

So yeah, I have no idea what he's on about...

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