Introduction

Birdfeeder is the prototype implementation of a RESTful, interoperable, Internet-scale microblogging protocol, tentatively called Fethr (Featherweight Entangled Timelines over HTTP Requests).

Birdfeeder is part of an ongoing (2009) research project by Daniel Sandler at Rice University. (follow me: FETHR; Twitter)

Code

NEW   Check out birdfeeder, the prototype FETHR client, at its bitbucket repository.

Documents

Refereed publications

• NEW   D. R. Sandler and D. S. Wallach. Birds of a FETHR: Open, decentralized micropublishing. To appear in Proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS ’09). – PDF HTML – slides & audio

Blogs and other articles

• 8-Dec 2008: On Twitter as a research problem.
• 18-Nov 2008: Down for everyone, but not me.

Other related work

• D. Sandler and D. S. Wallach. Casting votes in the Auditorium. In Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX/ACCURATE Electronic Voting Technology Workshop (EVT’07), 2007. – PDF HTML
• D. Sandler. FeedTree: Scalable and prompt delivery for Web feeds. Master’s thesis, Rice University, 2007. – PDF

Protocol documentation

Data

We’re making the following data sets available to other researchers:

• Three weeks of Twitter traces from September 2008 (9/3–9/25). 4,917,042 public messages; 472,735 users. Forthcoming.

Contact

Daniel Sandler, dsandler@{twitter,email}.