Deadly Bloody Serious

Dave Winer has been thinking about ways to preserve the Twitter community even when Twitter is down. His latest effort is a web service to save Twitter feeds and expose their content via another feed.

I tried it out, but couldn’t parse the response:

Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Jan 17 2008, 19:35:17)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5465)] on darwin
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import xmlrpclib, urllib2
>>> twittergram = xmlrpclib.Server(”http://rpc.twittergram.com/RPC2/”)
>>> content = urllib2.urlopen(”http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/704593.rss”).read()
>>> twittergram.saveFeed(’garthk’, ‘*****’, content)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File ““, line 1, in 
  File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1147, in __call__
    return self.__send(self.__name, args)
  File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1437, in __request
    verbose=self.__verbose
  File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1201, in request
    return self._parse_response(h.getfile(), sock)
  File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 1335, in _parse_response
    p.feed(response)
  File “/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/xmlrpclib.py”, line 547, in feed
    self._parser.Parse(data, 0)
xml.parsers.expat.ExpatError: mismatched tag: line 10, column 7

I’ll investigate later.

I’d love to wade into this kind of problem domain, perhaps using Google App Engine for hosting so I didn’t have to worry about usage spikes. Feed backup is a brilliant start. We also need to helping our followers find the feeds, and I’m sure more thought will yield more areas for funimprovement.