Services + Post Types

[poweruser82]

A post type can have different meaning depending on where it is used:

• A status post could be a reply to another post, a comment to photo, a side note in an essay…
• A photo post could be a photo of an album, part of a photo stream, a reply to a status, a screenshot…
• An essay post could be a blog post, a longer comment, an essay, a school homework…

Now if an app just declares to support a specific post type, it could receive posts that are not related to the functionality it offers and weird things happen:

• TentStatus declares to support status posts, so it can receives a status post which is a comment to an essay it can't display; it can handle the post, but users don't expect to see it in their timeline.
• Tentstagram declares to support photo posts, so it can receives a photo post which is a screenshot; it can handle the image, but it make no sense to show it beside your ultrafiltered dish pictures.
• Reevio declares to support essay posts, so it can can receives an essay post which is a homework and publishes it in your blog; it can handle the post, but I don't want my homework on my public website.

My proposal is to specify Services.
Examples of services are: microblog, blog, photo sharing, image hosting, social network… Each service declares which post types it relies on:

• microblog declares support for status or photos for entries and replies
• blog declares support for essay for blog entries, status or essay for comments
• photo sharing declares support for photo for its stream and status for comments
• image hosting declares support for photo to be inserted in albums and status for comments
• social network declares support for status or photos for entries, status for comments to entries

Tent apps declare their support for one or more services implying that they support all post types specified by those services. Each app only receives and processes posts belonging to the services it declares to support.

Apps like:

• TentStatus, Twitter, App.net, Bungloo, Bivy.me, Trion, splatmonstar implement the microblog service
• Reevio, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr implement the blog service.
• Instagram, 500px implement the photo sharing service
• Flickr, Picasa, Facebook implement the image hosting service
• Facebook, Google+, Diaspora* implement the social network service.

This way Flickr doesn't have to process comments to an essay just because they are statuses or Bungloo's timeline doesn't get filled by comments on essays it doesn't understand.
More, various services don't have to define post types that are a duplicate of already existing, established and widely supported ones.

Users of apps that support a service can seamlessly interact with users of other apps that support the same service. And they can use different apps depending their current device.
One could comment a Google+ post from Facebook and vice versa.

[danielsiders]

Post types absolutely have semantic meaning, although that may not be evident in the current crop of apps. Status posts should never be used as comments on blogs, a new post type blog-comment should be created. A greater variety of purpose-built post types in combination with post type fragments #183 should fully disambiguate most cases. https://tent.io will be updated after the 0.3 release to contain a "thinking with Tent" section that includes example queries for a number of common applications. If things are still unclear after that, let us know and we can provide further documentation.