Micro-blogging growing up?

TinyURL'd

The term ‘Web 2.0′ seems to have reached its apex.  By this, I mean that the new internet appears to have well established its ground roots.  One way to tell this is happening is the relative explosion of open source forums of these popular applications.  Specifically, lacroni.ca and Sweetcron, steroid-enhanced versions of Twitter and a pseudo-ish Netvibes, respectively.

Since its release, July 13, 2006, Twitter has shown the idea of micro-blogging to be very welcome.  But, as with any popular idea, it was copied and cloned - sometimes for the better, but usually the worse.  Intentional or not, these have proven to be independant feature-testers for the ever evolving micro-blogging community.  Pownce, the most successful post-Twitter service, was founded by Leah Culver, Daniel Burka and the internet god known as Kevin Rose, the father of Digg.  It was renowned for its contextual media formatting as well as its threading ability - something Twitter should have (but still has not) started out with.  Along with that, the Digg team brought an extremely loyal community, that community was then very compliant with the aforementioned technological advantage it already had over Twitter - the basic idea of threading.

As said in a previous article, the popularity of social networks can lead to its eventual standardization, as was the case with MySpace and, later, Facebook.  The difference here is that after MySpace’s apparent ‘prime’ my favorite acronym came to be; RSS.  Although the following system used in Twitter, or in any other micro-blogging service does not use RSS (directly), but as a following/ (Real Simple) Syndication system, RSS did seem to popularize the idea.

So where are we now?  Micro-blogging has proven itself as one of the distinctive aspects of Web 2.0.  The only problem, is, well, no matter how secure a server may be, private corporate data should never, and will never, leave the office - in server form or not.  That is the problem with all online services - being online, rather, online in servers not of your own.  Companies and groups and clubs and communities will be able to create and manage their own social groups.  With more control and less server-overloads, as are so famous on Twitter.com.

As for Sweetcron?  Lifestreaming appeared not long ago, not even a year.  My favorite one is, most cleverly titled Lifestream.fm.  With so many social communities, how can anyone keep track of a single person?  The answer to that is called lifestreaming, FriendFeed was actually one of the first, Lifestream.fm is just the nicest looking one.  The idea here is to just aggregate all of your information to one spot.  In this case, security and serverload has never been much an issue, but the idea behind it, the self-aggregation, can be used in so many services.

And that is where this OSS comes in.  This is why I get so damn excited about programs like lacroni.ca and Sweetcron.  The popularity of such niche services show what people want to do with the technology, and now, OSS is going to let them do that.

Tags: identi.ca, laconica, pownce, Twitter

Identi.cating the Twitter down-time

TinyURL'd

I admit, my initial impression of identi.ca was rather bland.  Aesthetically, it was pretty bland and, at the time, I saw nothing really special about it.  What I was looking for was purely the look and feel of the system… Identi.ca, or more specifically, Laconica - the open Micro-blogging tool behind it.  This article is really more about the system, Laconica, than their canonical server, Identi.ca, but the name went really well with the pun. So what is this other than an apparent Twitter clone?  And what makes this different than all of the others? Open Source Software.  I was first excited and then rather down about the idea, and then I got happy again. Digg.com, the name in itself, and the popularity and community behind it.  MySpace, as well, had the same namesake behind it.  Besides Facebook, I think the name of Twitter has the strongest ‘label’ behind it.  As it was for IM clients for me, where I chose MSN mainly because that was just the standard.  Without installing seperate clients, I could not talk to other friends.  As do users now have tools like Pidgin and meebo, RSS is allowing users to spread their content around thusly.  Leo Laporte calls it the Network effect.  More daunting, even, than the Leo effect. Laconica is taking that idea much deeper than some API.  And here is how I mean;

1. Identi.ca has its user base powered by Laconica.  As Laconica is an OSS system, it is free to be used by any server with PHP support - so any web server.  And yes, it is running on PHP.  Twitter runs on Ruby on Rails, which along with its coding scheme (apparently, I dont know why, but this is what I hear), and with PHP they are seeing a lot more up-time, and is also a lot earier to install.  Copy & Paste, yannow?
2. It works backwards.  Laconica is to, and does, work as a micro-blogging form of OpenID.  OpenID works thusly, by letting a single username be used for multiple services.  In the following diagram, the OpenID server (there are many) relays requests from a user toward the website.  Laconica runs the same idea.  Essentially, Laconica will lets you post in other Laconica micro-blogs with your user name from another Lacronica server.   My identi.ca account could comment and subscribe to posts from my zeitgeister account.  Different website, same program.
3. It is self-hosted.  One of the major reasons, or so I would assume, that companies and the like shy away from working this micro-blogging idea is that it is all on your own servers.  It would be fantastic for niche communities, open for whoever you want, but also, wherein it necessary, entirely safe and private.

First and foremost, I am excited for the idea of this, I am excited for the OSS behind it all.  But even moreso than that, I am excited about what can happen with this.

Tags: Blogging, identi.ca, laporte, leo, micro, Twitter