Attack of the Clones

TinyURL'd

The micro-blogging world seems in a bit of an upheaval since the announcement by Leah Culver about the Perma Ackbar’ring of Pownce.  Currently, I am only following 79 users on Twitter, and even still I have already heard of a few cases of ex-Pownce users planning on picking up where Pownce left off by creating yet another micro-blogging service.  Are there not enough already?  And with the maturity and popularity of the lacroni.ca platform, why would anyone bother on writing their own?  I mean, how long did it take for Twitter to get it right, in at least the areas of stability?

A good 80% of Pownce users I have asked the question to confessed they came across that website because Kevin Rose said so.  As imaginary as those numbers may be, Pownce started off with a lot going for it; namely the first half of the partnership between Kevin Rose and Leah Culver, and in the ever-expansive (and ever-cramped) world of micro-blogging, it needed the help.

Off the top of my head; Rejaw, Jaiku, Plurk, Identi.ca, Tumblr, Brightkite, kwippy, Yammer, Koornk and Utterli come to mind, and that is ignoring those of current mention already.  And I am more positive than Pamela Anderson is of Hepatitis C that there are an innumerable amount still out there.  That is a lot, and that is why Pownce needed that extra bit of something to stick out in the crowd, something that mattered before anyone mattered looking into the threading and UI design.  But that is the same thing with the until-recently exlusive IM programs (Yahoo!, AIM, MSN, ICQ, etc) as their exclusivity was replaced by programs like Pidgin and Adium, but I digress.  For the same reason certain people used one program over the other, certain communities revolved around certain micro-blogging services, so the most popular ones were, in itself, more reason to join.  Community websites are the epitome of snowball effect usage.

As much a fan of Pownce as I was, I find it idiocy to even deny the fact that Pownce was heavily inspired by Twitter, in some places seen as a clone.  The thing about clones is that there are a lot of them, so why are people insisting that Pownce needs to be rebuilt?  I mentioned an excess of 10 similar programs and to me, Twitter and Tumblr prudently and with a few tweaks within the system, does all but replaced my Pownce account.

As Pownce used the popularity of Kevin and Leah, ex-Pownce users and next-Pownce owners are banking on the popularity of Pownce in itself, but will that be enough?  Even within the geek-niche market that Pownce was originally marketted to, few of those users were exlusive Pownce users.  And within that few, even fewer were within the motive to write their own service, and an even fewer within that fewer-few will bother and try to use anything but a laconi.ca engine.

Although I deem near-any attempts at this pitiful and hopeless, the need to replace a more media based micro-blogging service may come to some really nice things.  Already I am talking to friends about creating a modified form of Twitter or using laconi.ca to write my own.

Why?  The same thing we do every night Pinky, try to take over the world!

Tags: laconica, microblogging, pownce, tumblr, Twitter

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