Cracking Facebook's Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer. Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementers of a new open source protocol called Salmon, which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another.
Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to "@janedoe@twitter" and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It's a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it's part of your phone provider's network or not. Facebook isn't implementing Salmon, but that's what Canadian open-source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold. Salmon Protocol. Salmon (protocol) The Salmon Protocol is a message exchange protocol running over HTTP designed to decentralize commentary and annotations made against newsfeed articles such as blog posts.
It allows a single discussion thread to be established between the article's origin and any feed reader or "aggregator" which is subscribing to the content. Put simply, that if an article appeared on 3 sites A (the source), B and C (the aggregates), that members of all 3 sites could see and contribute to a single thread of conversation regardless of site they were viewing from. The origin supplies a Salmon end point - a url in the metadata of an RSS / Atom feed. An aggregating site makes a note of the end point.