Comments on: Why Identi.ca needs to look further afield than open source

By: Dmitri

Dmitri — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:02:40 +0000

In my opinion, you’re basically saying that we need one social network that rules them all, which is never going to happen. If you’re going to have the exact same messages and things on all social networks, it’s kind of pointless to have them on all social networks - one social network would make a lot more sense, but that’s never going to happen.

By the way, it’s possible to build a system where you post in one place and then it shows up anywhere with a little bit of extra code on top of Ping.fm.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:11:20 +0000

You all even author of this article ARE too much U.S. centric in your opinions and this is your mistake

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:21:41 +0000

I would love it to be like you say, write once and it goes everywhere. It takes up so much to just trying to keep everything up to date.

By: Mag P

Mag P — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:33:56 +0000

Revou.com is another interesting application that allows one to startup their own twitter clones website very much like the open source identi.ca

By: Mag P

Mag P — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:33:33 +0000

Reovu.com is another interesting application that allows one to startup their own twitter clones website very much like the open source identi.ca

By: Ton Zijlstra

Ton Zijlstra — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:42:01 +0000

I like the notion of interoperability.
Suw’s suggestion of updating anywhere, get all answers back to you is important as simply broadcasting to all services like with ping.fm fundamentally breaks any conversational model of interaction. What I don’t like about cc-ing all services is that currently these services contain different circles of contacts. They’re not only services but places as well. So I have a different crowd in Jaiku, then I have in Twitter. And messages aren’t necessarily meant for all of them at the same time. So yes I like interoperability but then it should be possible to decouple channel from circle as well, and shape that differently. The conversational sphere should be leading in design, not the channel, when building a broadcast-to-all-and-aggregate-answers-from-all.

By: Kevin Anderson

Kevin Anderson — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 12:05:33 +0000

Evan, thanks for the clarification. One question. You say:

I’d rather work on laying the base for the next social net, and gently incenting those big services to become part of it (like AOL and MSN became part of the World Wide Web!).

I think that Suw and I are broadly in agreement with where you’re coming from. My question is how will you gently incent people to use the open services, which would more than gently incent the big services to become part of it?

By: Evan Prodromou

Evan Prodromou — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:43:37 +0000

Hey, Suw. So, I agree with your other commenters — you’ve kind of missed the point. Open Micro Blogging is about user autonomy — users can choose their servers, or set up their own, and still participate in a Web-wide social network. Open Source software isn’t strictly necessary to that scheme, but it does make a much better base for a wide-flung social network than a narrowly-defined consortium (compare OpenSocial).

We want to make a social network as big and diverse as the Web. The social software we have now works like the walled gardens of the early 90s — AOL, Compuserve, MSN. We’re moving out of that stage with projects like DiSo, OpenID & OAuth, and OpenMicroBlogging.

I guess what you want _right_now_ is something to post to all the networks you’re on — because they make it hard for you to talk to your different friends on different ones! I’d rather work on laying the base for the next social net, and gently incenting those big services to become part of it (like AOL and MSN became part of the World Wide Web!).

By: Rick Wolff

Rick Wolff — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:22:12 +0000

I’ll bet you’ve just outlined the 2008-9 wishlist of, of all things, Facebook.

By: Suw

Suw — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:53:01 +0000

Now that is interesting. I didn’t know that when I posited a multi-nodal system that would be resilient.

Indeed, I’ve managed to set up a sort of WOPA-AADD system already, using AIM to send message to Ping.fm which updates Identi.ca and Twitter with the same message. FriendFeed can pull in Twitter and, apparently, Identi.ca, and I can view that in Twhirl. The thing that’s missing is the de-duping bit, which is going to be a bit important if such a concatenation of services is to prove actually useful.