Identi.ca Is More About What Comes Next
I’m checking out a new platform that’s essentially Twitter-like, called Identi.ca. It has the basics: profile, friending, short messages, etc. There are a few things missing ( it’s not very easy to follow back, for instance). But overall, it’s interesting. I also like that you can build credentials around your OpenID account. I can’t wait for services like OAuth to catch up in popularity, but that’s a digression.
What’s really cool about Identi.ca has nothing to do with the site itself (no offense meant to the team building it. It’s neat, and thanks for doing it). What’s neat is that it’s built on an open source platform called Laconi.ca, which is basically Twitter-in-a-box. That’s the nugget, tough guys. It’s a head start on building your own Twitter inside your business, behind the firewall, and that’s something noteworthy.
I haven’t read the other reviews of the platform from other notables. I’m sure there’s a buzz.
I’m blogging this mostly to raise awareness that it’s out there: an alternative to Twitter that you can pick up and run with. The parts that aren’t there are fairly important: short codes and SMS integration, some of the central nervous system stuff. But is it a neat starting point? I say yes.
I probably won’t use the platform much, so I’ve stopped doing friend connections over there (sorry). I just wanted to dive in and check it out.
But are you using it? Have you tried it out? What’s your take?
I’m still sticking it out with Twitter as my presence/status/micromessaging site of choice. What about you?
Social Media Speaks Up- Are You Listening?
Disclosure, this is work-related
It’s really cool when you can take an idea and make it more interesting. I proposed shooting a webinar series with David Alston from Radian6. I’ve been such a fan of the app that I wanted to introduce it to more folks via my company’s webinar offerings. He said that he was up for it, and we went out to the SNCR New Comm Forum, and also O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo, and interviewed dozens of folks (over 30!).
Where it became cool was this: David says, “You know what would be cool? What if we could integrate Twitter into the webinar? Like, you know, have everyone be able to talk with the speakers, before, during, and after the webinars? It’d be like a relationship.” He pauses, cocks his head like a smart man, and says, “Twebinar.”
I said, “Register the domain!”
And so, here it is.
But the idea isn’t the steak; it’s the sizzle.
The Twebinar covers Game Changing Moves: Doing Business With Social Media and takes place Thursday the 26th of June at 2PM ET. It’s free to attend, and might be of value to your organization, should you be considering using social media tools. Also, it’s the first of three.
But remember, we’re going to encourage you to join Twitter and be part of the conversation. You’ll make 35 or so new friends almost instantly, and be able to follow the back channel conversation while watching the interviews. Read more about that here.
I think it’s a fun way to integrate webinars and Twitter, mixing a presentation technology with a conversation tool. I’m excited to be part of it, and I think it relates to what we’re doing in general with helping people understand social media tools and technologies.
What do you think? Interesting?
Bowing to Our Twitter Robot Overlords
I have an anti-robot stance on Twitter. By that, I mean to say that I don’t want to follow things that aren’t people (with all due respect to Bruce Sterling’s spimes). I just don’t need to add something automated into a place that’s inherently human. Or at least that was my stance.
Now, Tom Peters is evidently loosing a robot on Twitter, such that it will blurt out little Tom-isms. Hmm. I passed on the Seth Godin robot (wish to devil it was Seth for real), but the way Shelley Dolley put it has me thinking:
Tom’s not planning to jump on the micro-blogging bandwagon anytime soon (limit Tom to 140 characters? I don’t think so), so for now, this is the only way to get your Tom fix on Twitter.
So, hmmm. If it’s a little spurt of Tom Peters advice, and I like Tom (or Seth or Covey), maybe I should follow the robots?
Not sure. What say you?
Twitter Needs an Offline Mode and an Open Client
Dave Winer gave me the idea that clicked a bunch of pieces into place on my thoughts about Twitter’s need to scale. I want to put forth an idea that comes from my background in enterprise IT, where we had an application that wrote hundreds of thousands of short records a second to a database, and where we had processes in place for when the platform went down. Here are the problems, and then how I’d solve them with my enterprise IT hat on:
1.) Twitter, when it goes down, has nowhere to pass the traffic. This frustrates the customer base badly.
In my former wireless telecom world, we made a function that would permit calls to process while our database was offline. Call detail records would store up in a smaller database run by the same front end and middleware, and then when the databases were back up, we’d insert the records, and process everything accordingly.
2.) Twitter is essentially an app writing into a back end.
We need one layer of abstraction. One way to do this would be to use a client like Twhirl, and give it the availability to write tweets to two places: an RSS feed (so we could do more with the data- and I want that feature anyway, Loic. Okay?), and the second to an intermediate database somewhere on the Amazon S3 cloud.
When Twitter’s down, we run from Twhirl’s second pointer. When it comes back up, the database of new tweets gets reinserted.
If this is best accomplished by an XML feed, think about it: how much storage are 140 characters (okay, plus the meta data) for everyone you’re following. Make it a Twhirl-only feature for all I care.
Or, if Not Twhirl
I was thinking that we need SOME kind of front end, like a Firefox for this new kind of app. Something that resides in open source so that we can fork it, adjust it, adapt it, and work on the same code core, with the same baseline features, but with our own bells and whistles.
Enterprise Thinking
It’s strange that reading that one comment from Dave gave me a whole refresher course in how I used to work with fast-moving enterprise-grade data, and that it certainly has some parallels in what Twitter’s trying to do.
Take all these thoughts with love, Twitter and Twhirl. And please try and help us keep the flow alive.
Twitter Bashing- A Popular Sport Lately
I’ve been on Twitter since the fairly early days. Pre 2007SXSW, if that gives you a sense. And I give at least one presentation a week, plus DOZENS of conversations in various media spots about the values of Twitter and the benefits. But man, I’m really tired of things not working.
Call this the passion of someone who has grown to appreciate the business implications of what Twitter can do (and has done) for me, who sees several alternatives just sitting here revved up, waiting to take your traffic. No, not Jaiku or Pownce. Puh-leeze. Great teams, but they’re not the right play.
But FriendFeed? There’s a case there. Truly. I posted a new item in FF, and got THAT MANY (see above) comments in seconds. In the time it took me to start typing this, there are 14 19 MORE comments. So it’s alive. Truly.
I look on the twitter streams of the folks running the show and find nothing related. Nothing like, “Um, sorry we’re sucking right now, but we’re going to fix it.” And you know what? It was working better a few weeks ago when certain people were being raked over the coals on the way out the door. Tell you what. I miss Blaine.
What comes next? I’m not ready to bet on this one, because Twitter has somehow kept us all here, even when all these other apps were coming out. They all have some subset of better features, but we’re all on Twitter.
But I dunno, team. FriendFeed, if you can learn to work with the noise, I think this might end up picking up some serious “market share” in the social platforms.
Attention Newcomers to Social Platforms
Tread gently on ditching Twitter for FriendFeed. Read about 100 Louis Gray posts before attempting anything of that nature. Truly. It’s not the same vibe, and doesn’t have the same return on efforts as Twitter (not the same, I’m saying).
And me? I’m still on Twitter. But getting a bit feisty.
You?
Screen caps made with Skitch
A Day Without Twitter
Yesterday, I took the day off from Twitter. I’ve been using it fairly solidly since the early days, and wanted to get a feel for what I was counting on Twitter to do for me. The results were interesting:
- I count on Twitter for group answers. A LOT. For instance, I needed to know who from the social media scene was in Detroit. I ended up using LinkedIn, but I know that means I missed a bunch of folks.
- I count on Twitter as a way to express quick, random thoughts, or to mention references to cultural items to which I know people will respond. (For instance, I like tweeting parts of song lyrics, because it’s fun when people pick the song up as a reply).
- I use Twitter to promote other people. While I was dark, I got no less than 14 requests to promote fundraising causes, and 12 general promotion requests.
- I use Twitter to promote myself, my blog, things I’m doing.
A day without Twitter didn’t give me more time to write. It gave me fewer distractions, but I don’t sit around and LABOR on Twitter when I write something. Often times, I can just jot something from my mobile in between meetings, or I pop the window open, reply to a few folks, and then go back to my work. Meaning, I don’t find Twitter to be a time suck to me.
I’m wondering if I should try my “a day without” on other services, like email, or my BlackBerry.
Have you tried things like this? What would you lose if you didn’t have Twitter?
Photo Credit, Zed.Cat
I am NOT Digg
The benefit of having a large following on Twitter is that if I ask for someone’s attention, or point them towards something that I think is worthwhile, it drives a reasonable amount of traffic towards whatever I point out. I enjoy pointing out the occasional post on a friend’s site, and sharing something I’ve discovered out and about. At other points, I really don’t mind putting up the occasional interesting link, or getting the word out for a friend who requests it from me. If you’ve ever asked me to get the word out on something, please don’t read this post and think, “Wow, I’ve really put Chris out.” This is for a certain minority of folks who’ve cropped up recently.
I am not Digg.
Digg is a mechanical platform that uses the efforts of a crowd of people to promote interesting links, and get traffic to the ones voted most worthy by the community. The key points in this definition are “mechanical” and “crowd.” I, Chris Brogan, am neither mechanical, nor a crowd.
As such, it’s sometimes hard (becoming harder) to keep up with the sheer weight of people requesting that I link things for them.
I asked the question in Twitter today, whether anyone could cite whether my pointing towards something was even useful, from a stats perspective. Most folks couldn’t answer, and several wanted me to test it out by pointing to their site. So, for the most part, some folks who have asked for this don’t even know if it’s making a difference.
Beth Kanter said that there was a 30-something percent difference in traffic on efforts where she used me to get the word out, so thanks, Beth.
Where it gets tricky is scale. I’m one guy, with at tonight’s count, just over 6500 followers on Twitter. I’m happy to put out the word on something amazing you’ve done, or something you think is really meaningful, or a cause that really needs doing. But please continue to bear in mind that I’m one guy, with a day job, and a lot of other projects, and a writing schedule, and two kids, and I’m not a mechanical platform run by the voting of crowds.
I think Twitter is a great tool for promoting what’s useful, sharing what has our attention, and driving awareness of causes and information that’s really important. I’m sure you do, too. While you work on growing your network by building meaningful relationships and sharing useful information, I’m happy to help you from time to time. Very happy to help.
But I’m not Digg.
Customer Support on Twitter
Do you have a customer support organization? Is it possible that your customers are web users? I just noticed TurboTax Support has a Twitter account. How brilliant. It’s software. Software users (a reasonably high percentage of them) can potentially be online. Ergo, put “ears” into Twitter and be ready to respond. Brilliant. Truly. This is the customer service channel I mentioned in my post about from a week or two ago.
So, who else needs to be using Twitter as a listening and responding post? I know Dell is here. What about HP or IBM? What other brands should be listening? How can higher ups in a company be convinced that this is useful?
College Student Twitters Arrest in Egypt
“Arrested.” That’s what 29 year old James Karl Buck sent from his phone out to the world via Twitter the other day. It seems Buck was snapping photos of a demonstration, and police collected him up and put him in jail.
It turns out that his message on Twitter caused his network of friends to reach out, call around, and get people mobilized to help. There’s tons more to the story.
Greg Barnett sent me a message on Twitter reporting this news article about James Karl Buck. Steve Rhodes from Twitter sent me the link to Buck’s website. **UPDATE: Buck is @jamesbuck on Twitter, and his Flickr photos are here. (All those updates come from @tigerbeat / Steve Rhodes).
What’s important about this story? Everything. Twitter has a powerful ability to move people to action, to deliver help where it’s needed, and more. If a messaging platform can free a man from prison, what else can it do for YOU?
The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.
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GroupTweet Makes Twitter Groups Easy
GroupTweet lets a group of people subscribe to a single Twitter account, and get bounce-back messaging to everyone in the group. This is how accounts like @podcamp and @von work, more or less. Now, you can do it too. Every conference with a Twitter audience should add this to their operations to-do list.
(Hat tip, Web Worker Daily for this info.
