TrackBack Growing Up

It’s been a great week for TrackBack: First, PRWeb, one of the most popular sources for news releases on the web, has just announced that they’ve added support for TrackBack to all the press releases on the site. This shows one of the very practical benefits of TrackBack even for non-blog content, hopefully leading towards corporate communication being more open and community-driven.

We’re also delighted to note that there’s been a very positive initial reception to our announcement of an effort to standardize TrackBack. It is great to see so many people in participating in the provisional TrackBack Working Group.

Some of the key players in community standards and recent documentation efforts have already weighed in on the announcement:

• Dave Winer notes the effort without much comment, but his links are often a precursor to more full comments later. As Dave has pointed out himself, correctly, his own past implementations of TrackBack were compatible because breaking backwards compatibility even in the pursuit of technical improvements is not a path to be chosen lightly. Though there are sometimes instances when creating a new, incompatible path can be necessary in order to enable new benefits for users, it ought to be a considered decision, and Dave’s point is well taken as the conversation around standardization begins.

• Sam Ruby adds his link as well, again without extensive comment, but (judging by past experience) with the promise of some contributions of understated genius. If a TrackBack validator someday springs forth, it’ll no doubt be because of Sam doing a lot of the not-very-glamorous heavy lifting behind the scenes.

Of course, any new effort has some bumps. As Phil Ringnalda noted, we were having some glitches with our mailing list software, but it seems like everything’s cleared up now. Others pointed out that they were unable to access the newly revised TrackBack specification without first authenticating via Open ID. That too was an oversight on our part, and is now resolved.

So if you had experienced a problem in the past few days trying to join the standardization effort, try again, and you should be able to get through without a hitch. Even better, greater real-world adoption of the protocol means that the efforts of the group will someday be able to provide benefits to actual users, and not just to those of us who are interested in the technology.