What if we made a messaging system for code based on something like Twitter (might even be possible to use it?).
Instead of humans entering text, services would broadcast information (say XML encoding simple types only) along with a “theme” tag. Other services would decide to listen to broadcast events based on theme and data and even go on to produce their on data feeds – ad infinitum. Essentially automated mash-up’s of all sorts of data.
This would be akin to listening to RSS feeds and generating endless new ones based on who was listening, this would repeat to whatever depth the system could handle.
The system would be very dynamic and if services dwindled in attention flocking of mashed up data would also occur.
Possibly Twitter could be subverted to handle this – through sending XML
Hmmm, an echo chamber for robots.
You need evolutionary/market pressure for this to work, but I guess so long as the humans ultimately responsible for hosting the feeds and writing the mangling code can tell when they are popular, it could work out.
Not sure Twitter’s 140 character limit plays very well with the verbosity of XML! You could use identi.ca if you want an open source base where you could up those limits.
But why do you need a microblogging platform involved? Just use straight Atom/RSS feeds. If you were going to build on a popular platform and perhaps make it as easy as possible for all to play, you might want to look at Yahoo pipes.
The missing piece to make it all happen, I guess, would be the directory through which feeds register and subscribe to themes, and where people can check their popularity. Well, that and critical mass.
Will look at Yahoo pipes, possibly they munge already. Guess the directory just provides some meta theme information and a unified munged set of feeds?
There must be examples of distributed computing that use some form of this e.g. variants on RPC, but flow-based i.e. with some form of reflection API.
Will go on a hunt… I fancy using the slice as the directory, just not sure what the next step would be.