Category: Twittergram

Twittergrams: Guarding the Rhino


(photo CNN)

In Swahili the tick bird is named ‘askari wa kifaru,’ meaning ‘the rhino’s guard.’ The bird eats ticks it finds on the rhino and noisily warns of danger. Although the birds also eat blood from sores on the rhino’s skin and thus obstruct healing, they are still tolerated.

Take a look at what you need to pass to post a Twittergram; Twitter name, Twitter pass. Everything else, non-Twitter-specific and posting to your Twitter account is optional.

Imagine for a moment; Jaikugrams, Basecampgrams, Flickrgrams, Plazesgrams, Linkedingrams, and AnyServiceWithAnAPI-gram. The same exact Twittergram functionality riding atop each respective service 1.

Little birds flitting from rhino to rhino.

Ququoo.com has the same core functionality as another, much larger project I’m working on. Plus, I don’t need to write a login/pass registration system. In fact, that’s the rule w/ Ququoo development. It can’t have anything specific to Ququoo in it 2. Jen reminded me today of that. Her reminder has helped focus my Twittergram work – and dust off something this larger project needs desperately.

1. Number 3 if you’re following along.
2. Eric, maybe that’s the rule w/ Twitter as well 😉

5 July 07 Update: Yes, I think Twittergrams can be any kind of file and be larger than 200k. Maybe not with Dave’s service. But once you and programmatically decode a tinyurl you’ve got the idea.

8 July 07 Update: Feels like this accomplishes the same goal as OpenID…from a different angle. Where new sites ride atop older more established sites’ accounts – this solves 2 problems for new sites; needing to develop an account creation system and getting people to use the service. Scaling means supporting one more pre-existing account system.

Hictu.com Has Audio & Video Twittergrams

Looks like Hictu.com already has the Flash-based recorder Dave talked about.

Like Jaiku, you can add other feeds to your profile basically aggregating and auto-posting. No, Hictu doesn’t have an API (at least obviously).

Ha. Punny.

Yes, the ‘micro-blogging’ space is getting as silly as the social network, ‘start page’, and to-do list manager spaces.

Too many silos – all aggregating the same stuff for a slightly different group of people. I predict in 9 months one of 3 things will happen:

  1. An open source, de-centralized, install-on-your-own server version will be developed (think WordPress) based on OpenID.
  2. Everyone will abandon their accounts and move on to the next cool trend.
  3. We’ll all be managing multiple profiles to multiple ‘micro-blogging’ services in the same way we manage multiple profiles across multiple instant messaging services (a la Adium/Trillian/Gizmo Project).

Yes, they’re ranked according to my preference.

Elsewhere:

“And in the social media space we’re fickle. We’ll change a product (as long as our clique comes along too), like we change our underwear.” – Eric Rice

“For all their goodness, these ‘networks’ are silly. They are also as temporary and annoying in their competitive isolation as Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL were, back in the day (or the decade). Those things were Net-unfriendly long before their surviving members became Net-native.” – Doc Searls

TwitterGram – Front-end Napkin Sketch

sc00338b92

Like ququoo.com, I see Twittergram front-ends existing on-top-of, but for all intents and purposes independent from Twitter.com proper – using Twitter’s infrastructure for authentication, messaging, but otherwise very distinctive from Twitter as it has stabilized. The above sketch is heavily inspired by Twitterific, which is an OK fit. Something is still missing from it though.

I’ve got a couple *cast domain names that have been waiting for something like this. 🙂

28 Jun 07 Update: This is idea coming along. The mechanics of about 50% of the sketch’s functionality are in place. The next 50 is where it gets interesting.

30 Jun 07 Update: Started building out the interface. Not happy with how it coming along. It shouldn’t be this hard.

Dave just did something I’ve been thinki…

Dave just did something I’ve been thinking on and off about for a while now: Twitter meets podcasting. Behold – the promise of podcasting as voicemail….of _actually_ having a conversation via the ‘space phone’. I think I’ll dust off the FastCast idea after dinner tonight.

So the FastCast workflow tweaked for Twittering:
Record via Audio Hijack Pro -> HijackingWP script uploads to WordPress -> TwitterTools pushes Title and mp3 URL (not permalink) to Twitter.

Hmmm…HijackingWP could ping Twitter as well….more to come.

30 Jun 2007 Update:
Now, I’ve got an idea on how to work video into the mix. Not that video of any length could be under 200k, so there’s some work to do there. 🙂