jobserve has a crap ui...

[ewx]

...so I've fed the bit I'm interested in into a local newsgroup. News seems to be a good model for all sorts of things; while at Zeus I turned the perforce change lists into newsgroups, and I'm still convinced that news would be a good base to build something like livejournal on. (And of course it's the one true way to read mailing lists, though whether it's a news server or news reader that makes them look like news I'm agnostic about.) Perhaps we ought to have flexible personal news servers on every PC.

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

News would be an excellent base to build livejournal on - you could use the interface of your choice, rather than be shoehorned into the (mediocre) livejournal UI.

Of course, if the news system were reimplemented nowadays, news messages would be expressed in XML and transported using HTTP...

[simonb.livejournal.com]

I've pondered setting up a LJ <-> NNTP gateway using my LJ::Simple module.

However whilst it would be trival to do this for actual journal entries, it would be a lot harder to handle comments as there is no way in the LJ protocol to get comments or tell if a comment has been added to a journal entry.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Gack. You mean the programmable interface is less rich than the web interface? Idiots. My jobserve hack just grobbles stuff out of the HTML, I suppose you could do that for LJ but detecting and representing edits would be messy at best.

I was wondering about a Gnus backend which talked to LJ. But really I think you'd get something much better if you started from the ground up with a coherent design either based on news, or capable of having news plugged in relatively easily at one interface (I was originally imagining something a bit more transport-neutral than just blog-over-news, but that might just be needless complexity).

Semi-private remarks would be encrypted, of course. You wouldn't be able to revoke access to something someone had already seen, but that's true anyway while people can use cut and paste (at least until DRM is ubiquitous, but do you want to speculate how usable it'll be for the individual even when it is?) Completely private stuff would just not leave the user's computer in the first place, natch.

[simonb.livejournal.com]

Yep; whilst the flat API is reasonably nice if you want to deal with just journal entries, it falls over when dealing with comments. I get the feeling that comments were bolted onto the system at a later date and the flat API wasn't brought into line with the database stuff.