a financial institution that accepts deposits and channels the money into lending activities

I’m excited to see that somebody with the developer chops of Alex Payne has hooked up with a startup that promises a more simple bank.

It’s amusing to me that for all the annoyances I’ve had with banks over the years, I’ve never really imagined that anything could be too different about the way they were run. The biggest change in recent memory is the move to non brick and mortar establishments, like ING, that allow for smaller operational costs. This, of course, allows for better customer benefits and bigger profits.

So, at the risk of sounding naive, since I got to thinking about what a bank should be tonight, and since BankSimple is asking for feedback, here’s what I think a bank should provide.

A bank should live on:

• Customers who deposit money are the only reason banks are in business.
• Lending should provide (1) funding for operations and (2) passive income for customers.
• At the risk of everything else, the bank should hold the faith of those customers that trust the bank with their money.

That’s pretty much it.

If a bank wants to make a ton of money, they should explore other high risk avenues and leave the trusting customers to their solid banks.

If a bank wants to make enough money while making their customers happy, there are always low risk lending opportunities out there that allow you to both cover your costs and give at least a small amount back to your faithful customers.

And then.

In the 21st century, a bank should also live on electronic access that is:

• Secure.
• Always available.
• User friendly.
• Transparent.

So many banks are trapped in the 20th century with what can be done on the web, and that’s scary. Every time I do something on my non-ING bank’s website, I see the “https”, but I still have a hard time believing it. It’d be nice for once to be blown away by the design of a bank’s website, to have no troubles with the way data was collected, and to go away believing that my information was secure.

Once the first three are covered, it would ultimately be nice to see what data my bank had about me, how they used that data, and what methods they used to keep everything contained to my eyes only.

That adds up to a lot of words about how simple a bank should be, but the concepts are easy – take my money, be nice about it, hold it tight, and be sure to toss a little back my way every once and a while.

In order to get around that, I hope, I’m starting to establish more places for material to be published. I can get my quick thought, RT, slow chat, whatever done on Twitter. As of today, I can hopefully get the quick thought, but a little longer than 140 done at A Little Longer. I’m soon to setup a Tumblr blog that I can use to share media and other random bits. And I already have a Posterous site setup that I love to use when capturing pictures on my phone as kind of a mobile flow thing.

The end goal with all of this is to establish some kind of place for all of this published content to flow through. My own personal aggregator of sorts. The thought right now is that I can take what I learned from building My Status Cloud over the summer and apply it to a real time river of me at some central location.

Could all be very interesting. We’ll see.

In the last couple of weeks, both WordPress and Tumblr have announced support for the Twitter API.

The immediate benefits are that any forward thinking Twitter client can now also be a WordPress or Tumblr client as well. Tweetie, one of the most popular iPhone clients, has had support for this for a while and immediately became the tool of choice for testing the new features out. Choices for users expand.

So, with that development aside, where next? I see three things.

1) WordPress should publish an official plugin for WordPress.org that enables the Twitter API for any blog. This act alone could create millions of possible twitter servers.

2) WordPress/Tumblr should make a big deal about how their new changes are also already tied in with real time protocols RSSCloud and pubsubhubbub. This helps make the new twitter servers real time.

3) Everybody outside of Twitter should huddle for a brief second and add some new syntax to the existing twitter api that allows for a piece of metadata to be attached (urls to start), call it optional, and implement.

Or, in short– Now that you’ve shown how easy it is to implement Twitter’s API, rip it out of their hands, build a new community, and then market the hell out of it.

I’ve switched my connection from OpenDNS to Google for now. While all of the benchmarks that I’ve done on my end show that Google is slower than a few alternatives, I have a feeling it will get faster over time. Give them a few days to adapt to the new traffic.

If you’re looking for benchmark possibilities, I tried both namebench, which was pretty cool, and DNS Benchmark, which I like a lot.

At the moment it grabs the current trending topics from Twitter every several minutes while searching every few minutes for new tweets that mention twitpic.com as well as the topic. Toppics, get it.

Version 0.0 is very basic, but very fun. For example, I know when a football game starts because all of a sudden two team names pop up and I have jersey pictures from both sides. I’ve been able to determine that tweeps really like the Christmas tree at the Four Seasons by watching that category for the last day.

The display is only within the last 24 hours, and that does two things. One – it keeps the pictures relevant. One “Monday Night” trending topic is different from another. Two – it can keep picture counts low. I’m learning quickly that some trends just don’t generate pictures. I hope to add some more features in as well soon, possibly refrain from creating a topic page until it has content to display.

The next goal is to add content. It’d be nice to grab visuals from other sources than Twitpic, especially for the topics that don’t generate a lot of traffic. And, while visuals are great, if I can add some context with text, that would be ideal.

All in all, it’s another playground. Feel free to play.

Example.

I was just reading a story on the Ft. Hood shootings in the CNN application on my iPod and saw a line in the middle of the story that said “Twitter list: Keep up with who we’re following“. Now, this is a strike against the CNN app, as the text didn’t link to anything. But even if it had, what would it link to? More than likely the @cnnbrk/fort-hood Twitter list, which was created specifically to follow that story.

How would I use this?

If it were linked in the story, it would bring up a Safari window showing the list on Twitter.com.

Safari isn’t my default Twitter reader on the iPod though, Tweetie is.

This isn’t iPod specific either, this is web application specific. If I were looking at the CNN story in Chrome or Firefox, there is currently no way for me to tell the browser that clicking on a Twitter.com link should bring me to Brizzly to read it.

It would be very cool if there was a way for users to specify this type of cross-connection between apps.

I’m betting this is something that could be solved relatively easy in the PC browser world through extensions, but at this point can’t see it even be approached in the strict Apple app development world. At some point, we will realize the need to start treating web applications more like desktop applications in that users will want to leave one to visit another at times as part of their natural application flow.

It used to be that I would often purchase empty journals, mostly Moleskine, to record different moments in time. Now I’m realizing that my brain has started defaulting to “ooh, I should register a domain and setup a quick site for that.”

And somewhat further, I’m actually in progress of transferring the contents of a Moleskine to a website. Hmm. It’s amazing how everything progresses and yet somehow remains a circle.

I setup My Status Cloud as both RSS Cloud and PuSH enabled. But when I post a new Tweet or cloud message, I can only rely consistently on Dave Winer’s RSS Cloud hub to pass my update information on. The “official” pubsubhubbub server is hit and miss. Whether it’s rate limiting or being lazy, in my little decentralized 140 character network, not every status update is pushed to me immediately by PuSH. Some are grouped together after two updates have been sent. That’s not real time.

I’ve subscribed to many feeds that are PuSH enabled through My Status Cloud. Or at least the FeedBurner feed published indicates that they are. When do I get the updates? Often a large amount of time after they are published. Whenever I’ve gotten a notification from an RSS Cloud server, it is usually within seconds, sometimes up to a minute.

You. Are. Random. That’s the perception I have. There are so many feeds that I’m passed PuSH notifications throughout the day for – with old content and no new content. Fat pings, useful? Yes. More fat pings than necessary? Not so much.

I’ll be honest. I haven’t taken the time to read through the complete documentation to see if I can figure out how the server end of things is supposed to work behind the scenes. When I decide to build a server, I will. Maybe I’m missing an explanation for the sporadic-ness that is coming out of there, but it really should be resolved. If we’re going to be real time, let’s be it already.

Yes, seriously, it is there there already.

I built a public aggregator that supports RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub. Dave Winer has a public aggregator that supports RSS Cloud. Lazyfeed has an aggregator that supports RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub. Google Reader has started to adopt PubSubHubbub. Many more are on the way, if not already here. A few more light switches to flip and all of a sudden you are playing catch up.

Who’s you? Let’s try who isn’t first.

CNN has it. Their news wire feed has been RSS Cloud enabled almost since the moment that Dave Winer announced support for RSS Cloud in WordPress.

Om has it. Another that has been RSS Cloud enabled since the beginning.

Techcrunch has it two ways – RSS Cloud through the main feed and pubsubhubbub through the FeedBurner feed.

Gizmodo supports pubsubhubub through FeedBurner. GDGT supports pubsubhubbub through their native feed.

Who doesn’t?

Engadget has nothing enabled. They’re now the last source of gadget information. NY Times – nothing, LA Times – nothing, AP – nothing, Washington Post – nothing, MSNBC – nothing, Fox News – pretends to, Reuters – pretends to. More detail on the “pretends to” later, anybody else I’m forgetting?

So what do you do as a publisher?

You Read and then implement.

If I can ship an RSS Cloud aggregator in a little over a week from scratch, and add support for pubsubhubbub in a night, all while working a full time job during the day that has nothing to do with either…. you can afford to spend some time figuring out the best way for you to publish content using real time tech.

Which one is better? I don’t make those decisions. Which one should you implement? Whichever one you ship first. Just do it already and get on board.

What shouldn’t you do as a publisher?

I’m not usually one to say this, but don’t put all your faith in Google. Not yet at least. Just because you’re site uses FeedBurner and FeedBurner has decided they support pubsubhubbub, doesn’t mean that your content is actually being pushed in real time. More than likely you’re setup to ping FeedBurner separately. Feedburner then decides when to poll you before turning around and notifying the hub that the content is updated.

Instead, take control of your publishing process. Your web folks should be able to make the basic notifications required for both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub to work. And this should something that is done separate from the FeedBurner process. Don’t count on them to ping on their time. Ping when you publish.

The web is live, RSS and Atom are alive, and content is flowing in real time. I’m harnessing it, and you will be soon. If you are a publisher, you do not want to miss this boat.

Anyhow.

Number One.

As of last night, My Status Cloud has support for both RSS Cloud and pubsubhubbub.

Now, while everyone decides which protocol to use, we can just use them. Ship both first, then decide. I like that answer the best.

Actually, they both have benefits and can probably coexist. More notes on what I think will follow. I’ve been closely watching the notifications roll in and I do have some observations to share. Even more so than you will see in the next couple posts.

Number Two.