I’m hesitant to build too much on top of…

I’m hesitant to build too much on top of Twitter. Not just because of their historic instability, but because they’re a single silo – and each day brings a yet another silo.

With Ququoo.com, I’m relying on Twitter for registration. With the Twittergram work I’m doing, it’s that and a little bit more. Unlike Facebook, I don’t need permission to build these apps (a good thing), but with Twitter’s slower dev cycles, unreliable-ness, and not charging for anything (charging for something please! dev keys, anything!) I hesitate committing to much.

Today, to a great degree, the people that follow me, are following me on Twitter. 10 minutes from now, that may or not be the case. This post will be repub’d on Twitter, just as it is at Jaiku and Hictu, and in your own aggregator.

Just a reminder to work on projects that can easily go where the followers are rather than silo-specific projects.

Client Blogging: Joanne Henry

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been setting up a blog for Joanne Henry co-founder of the Henry Schafer Partners marketing.

When I sat down to walk her through WordPress, she already had 3 posts ready to go. She’s been steady since. Which is great, her writing style is perfect for blogging – informal, local, and full of her personality. From her post on the Twin’s stadium construction outside her office window:

“What I’ve liked at the Ford is the ability to come up with an idea, run it by others – and get their participation – sometimes all within an hour, but certainly within the same day. Call it the anti-committee.” – Joanne Henry

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

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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.

A Middle Man’s a Middle Man

“Apple is no different than Best Buy, Wal-Mart, or RIAA….No modern consumer is going to stop listening to their favorite band because Circuit City doesn’t carry their CD.” – Benn Jordan

Benn’s post is one of the many articles online showing how little compensation musicians receive from the business organizations that are said to be supporting them. While, it’s unfortunate that he mistakes piracy for lack of compensation, he highlights the need for an easy way to give money directly to musicians, and others who’s creative work you enjoy.

In the end, Benn admits:

“I make most of my living from licensing and composition.”

Bingo.

As you know, as much as I love writing this blog, I don’t make my living from it directly. I could….if you showered me with piles of PayPal donations.

Update 26 Jun 2007:
On the flip side, Dave Slusher describes an much needed aggregation and subscription service. Swap out mini-comics for local musicians or filmmakers and the same need exists.

Side note, as I read Dave’s post, I had a little deja vu. Always a good thing in my book.

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. 🙂