Tag: identica

The killer application for distributed social networking?

How do we make things move along quicker in the area of distributed/federated technology? Things are moving very slowly although it seems most of the components are in place.

When I wrote the blog about Rebel mouse, I found some interesting links to some distributed solutions which could see the end of the likes of twitter and facebook.

OStatus is an open standard for distributed status updates. The goal is to have a specification that allows different messaging hubs to route status updates between users in near-real-time. This spec took over from the OpenMicroBlogging spec of old.

I remember writing about wordpress’s distributed solution a while ago.

The weird thing is I logged into Diaspora again today and not only is it a ghost town (not like G+, but really like a ghost town) but it got me thinking whats different about Diaspora and G+? Now the hype died down, its time to see some very cool uses of Diaspora. What have they got to loose? Dare I say it, wheres the killer application? Wheres the thing which will make people sit up and take note once again? Heck whys no one doing cool stuff with the API?

So what is the killer application which will tip people over? I have some thoughts but what ever it is, please let it happen soon before we’re all forced to beg twitter, facebook, etc for our data back.

The end of open twitter?

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Its been a good load of years since I visited a promising startup in South Park, San Francisco called Twitter. Oh have they changed…

There has been a whole number of stories and posts about how Twitter is locking down the API calls and access to data. Not only that they are being very shirty with some of the clients and services around it.

Its ironic we use to praise Twitter for there business model formed around creating a ecosystem around its self by leveraging APIs. It was one of the web 2.0 darlings but something happened…

Twitter right from the start had people asking how were they going to make money to keep going?

Well what ever direction they decided to go in, its meant breaking what made it hugely popular.

The question is what will people move on to? Since Twitter for the longest time have sucked the air out of the microblogging ecosystem and seen off most of the alternatives including Plurk, Pownce, etc…

Jaiku Engine is a opensource project after Google bought it and open sourced it. However it lacks something which status.net and identi.ca had built in from day one. Federation… Jaiku engine has also gone quiet since Google plus launched too. I wonder, what if distributed social networking also come to the rescue and provide a nice mix of social networking like facebook/google+ and federated microblogging?

Twitter has done some great things but frankly the business model they have chosen is rubbing up against too many of my and other peoples freedom. I now wonder if I will ever be able to get a dump of all my tweets, dm’s and mentions? (Dataportability!) Google and Facebook have actually been quite good about this, Twitter much less so.

Switching over to Tweetdeck

I switched over to Tweetdeck a while ago… I use to use Gwibber on my laptop/desktop machines and Peep on my Android phone but recently switched…

HTC Peep was ok but honestly it use to wind me up when it wouldn’t update when the storage was quite low. No warning either. Gwibber was great but I found it slow when adding lots of columns. I tend to have a column for all the people I’m following (home) one for replies (@replies) and finally one for Private messages (d msgs). On top of that I have searches for events and the such things. Tweetdeck handles these pretty much in its stride, but Gwibber use to do odd things.

I think it might have something to do with being connected to Twitter x2, Identi.ca, Facebook and other services.

The one thing I do miss from Tweetdeck is the ability to connect to a identica and status.net server. Instead there’s accounts for Facebook (which actually works very well) and Google Buzz. Honestly I’d switch out Buzz for status.net anyday.

I don’t know how the news Twitter might buy Tweetdeck will effect everything but it looks like status.net and even the open microblogging standard isn’t coming any time soon. I may switch back one day, specially if Gwibber 3.0 is as good as it could be.

What should the character limit be on microblogging?

Evan Prodromou who I finally met at FOSDEM recently, has been running a poll to find out whats the best character limit for microblogging.

For our flagship site, Identi.ca, which runs on the status.net cloud service and uses the 0.9.0 beta, we’d like to open up the discussion of what an appropriate character limit should be. Setting a site-wide limit is a community decision we’d like to leave in the community’s hands. In a conversation on Identi.ca we’ve solicited some candidate character limits that we’d like people to decide on.

  • 140 is compatible with Twitter; in many languages a notice with 140 characters fits into a single SMS message*
  • 280 can fit into two Twitter or SMS messages
  • 300 is a fan favorite
  • 420 is Facebook’s status limit and 3 Twitter tweets or SMS messages
  • 500 is a little bigger
  • 1000 is bigger than that
  • Unlimited
  • Other

So personally I think 300 is enough. 300 will hold a very long URI with room for query string values. Also having it about the size of two text messages seems about right. If you stick to ANSI only characters you usually get about 306 characters to text with (160+160 with overhead) on most phones. Unicode drops it down to 280 characters which still seems fairly close to 300. I’m also thinking 300 characters keeps things micro readable still.

The idea of a more structured microblogging with URIs as metadata in interesting but I think metadata should be inline and in plain view. Its one of the neat things about Microblogging, which would be a shame to remove. Also got to say anything more complex than the current microblogging setup would maybe cause too many problems with backwards compatible. Literate results are good, if you want metadata use blogging instead.