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 the product of research undertaken by Daniel Sandler while studying at at Rice University between 2008 and 2009. The prototype is currently offline; please refer to the resources below.

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}.