identi.ca

Tearing down Twitter's walls

Remember those crazy days of e-mail when you couldn't send messages between systems? Microsoft Mail customers could only send mail within their enterprise or to other customers of Microsoft Mail (ditto for the other systems). It wasn't until SMTP standardized things that e-mail could move between systems.

E-mail was interesting then, but it didn't really become dominant until it standardized around the SMTP messaging protocol.

Are we experiencing the same thing with Twitter?

Twitter has become hugely popular, but it remains a closed communication medium. Yes, it has opened its data stream and maintains an open API approach … Read more

John Chambers' video vision: Shortsighted

Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.

Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?

Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."

Cisco gets this. At least, groups within … Read more

How to downsize your social network portfolio

I'm as guilty as the next person for having a social network portfolio that's too big. Aside from my Twitter account, I belong to Plurk and Identi.ca, and although I use Facebook most often, I still have MySpace and Hi5 accounts.

But now that 2008 has passed and it's time for us to evaluate what we did last year and try to improve upon that for 2009, why don't we start by cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that we like best in each category? After all, spending more … Read more

Exclusive: Twhirl gets pushy with Identi.ca

The next update of Twhirl will get support for yet another nanoblogging service, Identi.ca, and on that platform Twhirl will feature a communication method that Twitter users have been asking for: push updates.

Read to end of story for the download link and instructions.

In other words, the Twhirl client won't have to ping the Identi.ca servers to get updates; instead, updates will be sent directly to the Twhirl client. This makes nanoblog conversations more live--you can have a back-and-forth without hovering over the "update" button. It also means that your Twhirl client doesn't … Read more