In May/June I was looking at SMOB which is Semantic-web microblogging basically, and I thought that was probably the key to causing sites to be able to interoperate (and actually, I think that's still the way to go for Groups because a SMOB group can span multiple sites)

While studying OAuth and searching for XRDS and trying to figure out where that all fits in, I found Evan's spec posted as a blog post on http://search.technorati.com — it was weird because I would google for “openmicroblogging” and just the single result would come up. I was impressed, because here was something new, and nobody seemed to be doing anything with it, and it was _simple_ which is always the key pretty much.

So I took my PHP framework and used it to implement the spec from scratch, I've built a lot of in-house sites and a lot of my own sites with the framework but it's pretty new and will certainly need a lot of work to make it solid. But it does have some good design aspects like Model Security, Restful polymorphic controllers, Routes and Content-negotiation so it's pretty sophisticated if a little hurkin'.

As you can see I took advantage of some existing infrastructure — A Wordpress theme called “prologue” and the diso-project plugins. Basically I wrote a fairly crude compatibility layer for my framework to take advantage of those wordpress plugins. All they really provide are the theme and the OAuth and OpenID libraries. The actual implementation of openmicroblogging is in the plugin called “omb.php”.

The OAuth “dance” was pretty exciting to get working for the first time, it's like OpenID the way it bounces between sites and I think a lot of awesome software will be written with OAuth and OpenID in the future.

— Brian

I first bookmarked it on June 16 and started working on my implementation right away, leaning on the diso-project's OAuth/XRDS wordpress plugins I had some of the spec working when Laconi.ca and Identi.ca were announced 2 weeks later.

From there I grabbed Laconi.ca and started to make my service compatible.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting a comment here is because of Ron's comment about “could be installed everywhere” — that's a huge part of how I write PHP code. In fact my implementation of omb should work on Mac, Linux, Windows, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP4, PHP5 etc.

Check it out here:

http://openmicroblogger.com

http://openmicroblogger.org

Thanks, and thanks especially to Evan for putting together OAuth/XRDS etc into something really useful and fun.

— Brian

In May/June I was looking at SMOB which is Semantic-web microblogging basically, and I thought that was probably the key to causing sites to be able to interoperate (and actually, I think that's still the way to go for Groups because a SMOB group can span multiple sites)

While studying OAuth and searching for XRDS and trying to figure out where that all fits in, I found Evan's spec posted as a blog post on http://search.technorati.com — it was weird because I would google for “openmicroblogging” and just the single result would come up. I was impressed, because here was something new, and nobody seemed to be doing anything with it, and it was _simple_ which is always the key pretty much.

So I took my PHP framework and used it to implement the spec from scratch, I've built a lot of in-house sites and a lot of my own sites with the framework but it's pretty new and will certainly need a lot of work to make it solid. But it does have some good design aspects like Model Security, Restful polymorphic controllers, Routes and Content-negotiation so it's pretty sophisticated if a little hurkin'.

As you can see I took advantage of some existing infrastructure — A Wordpress theme called “prologue” and the diso-project plugins. Basically I wrote a fairly crude compatibility layer for my framework to take advantage of those wordpress plugins. All they really provide are the theme and the OAuth and OpenID libraries. The actual implementation of openmicroblogging is in the plugin called “omb.php”.

The OAuth “dance” was pretty exciting to get working for the first time, it's like OpenID the way it bounces between sites and I think a lot of awesome software will be written with OAuth and OpenID in the future.

— Brian

I first bookmarked it on June 16 and started working on my implementation right away, leaning on the diso-project's OAuth/XRDS wordpress plugins I had some of the spec working when Laconi.ca and Identi.ca were announced 2 weeks later.

From there I grabbed Laconi.ca and started to make my service compatible.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting a comment here is because of Ron's comment about “could be installed everywhere” — that's a huge part of how I write PHP code. In fact my implementation of omb should work on Mac, Linux, Windows, PostgreSQL, MySQL, PHP4, PHP5 etc.

Check it out here:

http://openmicroblogger.com

http://openmicroblogger.org

Thanks, and thanks especially to Evan for putting together OAuth/XRDS etc into something really useful and fun.

— Brian

My primary interests are with the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, and Laconi.ca. OMB needs serious work – a bit more democracy around it and better documentation. I'm still not sure how various Laconica sites interact with each other. It would be nice to see OMB as something can be viewed as truly open and something anyone could build a service off of, with or without using Laconi.ca as the server backend.

Vision-wise I'd love to see these services take the whole field past the “Twitter replacement” concept and more into the evolution of the behavior. Even the term “micro blogging” is misleading, since many examples of Twitter user behavior have nothing to do with blogging or even status updates, especially in the case of interacting with various Twitter-API dependent sites. I've started calling it “published short messaging”, which is deliberately more open-ended.

In some ways I'd like to see OMB or Laconica evolve into something that could be installed everywhere, as ubiquitous as email. In some ways it should be just a feature for an ISP or social networking site rather than services unto themselves. It would dissolve Identi.ca, Twitter, Pownce or Plurk as “microblogging” brands though – I suppose these services would simply become specialized published short messaging communities…

Anyhow, there's my little rant on the subject – thanks for the writeup!