Joseph Scott, developer at Automattic, posted that Wordpress.com has recently broken 4 million total blogs. He further mentions that it took just 4 months to go from 3 million to 4 million. Assuming the rate isn’t exponential, it will just be end of December when they hit 5 million blogs. What would be even more fascinating is to know how many self-hosted blogs on Wordpress are currently running. (This blog is a Wordpress MU install)

Wordpress seems to be no Facebook, but perhaps as projects like BuddyPress take off and people begin to virally create blogs and content with their friends it will get to that level. Where Wordpress still has left to compete is with microblogging sites like Twitter - perhaps, with the large user base that they currently have we could see this happen in the near future.

I broke news last night on LouisGray.com about Twitter enabling a new API feature, “in_reply_to_status_id”, to allow developers to tie replies to their original reply source. Immediately afterwards Evan Prodromou of Identi.ca added the same functionality to the Laconi.ca source code, making two of the most popular microblogging platforms, Twitter and Identi.ca, along with the already supporting FriendFeed, supportive of threaded comments. Immediately we saw Dave Winer implement a proof of concept example, and YooPlace also implemented it into their own code. Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, the owners of the Twhirl Twitter client responded as well saying he was reading the article and looking into it.

So a big question has become evident now that we can threaded replies. Is the ‘@’ really necessary in your replies to friends on your favorite microblogging service any more? A comment by Steve Gillmor on Identi.ca got me thinking about this earlier, and I think he has a strong point. In fact, I’ve briefly touched the subject before here.

The ‘@’ is mostly a Twitter-invented custom brought to the service by its users with some slight roots in bulletin boards and forums where threading was not possible. Users decided the Twitter service made a great communications tool and began replying to their friends’ posted statuses with the ‘@’ symbol. There was no other way because Twitter wasn’t expecting to be a communications tool. The popular Twitter clients like Twhirl and TweetDeck and even Twitter’s own web-based client started catching on, and separating those posts with usernames prepended by ‘@’ as “replies”. What’s odd is that the only thing they recognize as a reply is if the username is prepended by an ‘@’ - they take no thought as to the actual username itself, which really is the actual substance of who the user was replying to. In fact, FriendFeed users are starting to do this as well since it only has one level of threading and users can’t comment on other users’ comments. (Twitter and Identi.ca are actually one-upping Friendfeed with their recent announcements)

So while the “@”’s were a custom, they really aren’t necessary to determine if a user is replying to another user. In fact, even today you can use an XMPP tracker like Twitter Spy and Laconica Spy and track your username and get notified when a person mentions your username, exactly the way “@” replies work. It was silly that the “@”’s were required to be recognized as a reply in the first place.

Now, considering you can now actually track on the back end the entire hierarchy of a conversation via the API “@”’s are even less necessary as before. I’d like to see the various microblogging clients start to ignore the “@”’s and allow users to simply type usernames when replying to another individual, assuming threads aren’t in place. Then, once threads start to show in your favorite microblogging clients, even the usernames shouldn’t be necessary.

I’ve mentioned before that IRC works this way and most IRC clients will look at the existing list of users in a room and automatically detect the username and notify the targeted user if the message is directed at that user. Not only that, but the IRC clients actually keep a cached version of the users in a particular room and will even auto-complete usernames if you begin typing in the username and hit “tab”. That’s what I’d like to start seeing microblogging clients do so long as they’re going to be supporting a communications platform, and it should start with Twitter and Identi.ca themselves on their own web interfaces.

Then again, all this may now be moot with threading available. Oh, and don’t even get me started on hashtags. (Those should be handled by the API, not in the content of the message!) I think I’m going to try a new experiment of just not using the “@”’s like Steve Gillmor does - anyone else want to join me?

There’s a new kid in town in the microblogging space, and no it’s not just “another microblogging site”. I talked to Brian Hendrickson, the lead developer behind OpenMicroblogger.org and its accompanying service OpenMicroblogger.com today and he may just have something to scare both Twitter, and Evan Prodromou of Identi.ca in their tracks. What’s amazing about it all is Brian has actually taken the OpenMicroBlogging protocol that Evan established and implemented the protocol in Brian’s own, non-laconica-based implementation of the protocol that would communicate with any other OpenMicroblogging protocol supported site, similar to the way I mentioned on LouisGray earlier. Yes, OpenMicroblogger.com and the accompanying open source software it is based on will talk to Identi.ca, and on a completely different code base. That means you can follow anyone on Identi.ca within the OpenMicroblogger.com service and vice-versa, and they were written from the ground up by two entirely different developers!

What’s even more amazing about this new platform is that while not a Wordpress implementation, Brian seems to have made the platform almost entirely compatible with the Wordpress plugin and theme API. So, basically, if you are a Wordpress developer, you can write your own extensions to the code, implement your own versions of the code, and write your own themes, all in the same way you do on Wordpress. Brian wrote the code from the ground up using a framework he built and calls “dbscript”, and it contains no Wordpress code whatsoever. He felt Wordpress was too bulky to handle a full Microblogging platform (do I smell a potential acquisition by Automattic?). In fact, adding in integration with the OpenMicroBlogging Protocol was as simple as just adding a simple PHP plugin to his dbscript implementaion. The look and feel of OpenMicroblogger.com, his own implementation of the codebase, is all just an implementation of the Wordpress Prologue theme that my friend Joseph Scott at Automattic wrote.

Brian tells me that while Laconi.ca’s codebase is very good technology (he had very good things to say about Identi.ca, Evan, and the Laconi.ca codebase, especially when compared to Twitter), the technology underneath OpenMicroblogger and DBScript is even stronger and more scalable. According to him, “dbscript is an advanced ‘Restful’ framework with sophisticated features that are not found in the Wordpress code base, it shares features with Ruby on Rails (ruby) and Django (python) — things like MVC, ActiveRecord, Routes, Content-Negotiation”. Because the underlying code is Restful, an API is almost inheritently provided for other developers to interact with your implementation of the code-base and write their own applications for it.

OpenMicroblogger and DBScript are based on an open source MIT license similar to the license Ruby is under. Brian says it took him just 8 weeks to write this advanced implementation, with other client projects going on at the same time and 2 kids, which shows how simple it is to implement the Openmicroblogging Protocol. It also shows his devotion to the work.

OpenMicroblogger.com, the service that shows off his code, has some really nice features (also available in the code) such as sharing links and pictures with friends - definitely a little more advanced than Identi.ca in that manner. He fully supports the OpenID standard (he actually wrote his own OpenID host using his framework!), and is very big on OAuth and other standards and open protocols so you can expect to see much more around that with the site.

This one simple and amazing example goes to show that we have only hit the tip of the iceberg here on microblogging technology. Now that a Protocol has been established, you will see more and more sites and developers write their own extensions of the protocol to implement their own creative microblogging solutions and layers. This very creative and innovative solution could just be a more advanced option than Laconi.ca to consider for Microbranded solutions in the future. Brian has taken “viral coding” to heart.

You can download the code, try out, learn more and help out the OpenMicroblogger.org project over at http://openmicroblogger.org. I’ve created an account at http://openmicroblogger.com/?jessestay, and you can actually just go there, follow me, and follow my OpenMicroBlogger.com updates right on Identi.ca! Or, you can go over and create an account for yourself.

UPDATE: Brian corrected me about it being more scalable than Laconi.ca (see the comments below) - according to him, “Actually Laconi.ca is the more robust code and is more scalable. dbscript is a meta-object framework and runs some extra queries to “learn” about the db schema — it is currently not very optimized for performance, but is geared towards being programmer-friendly.”

Yesterday I announced I am permanently and officially on hiatus from Twitter. Bloggers and other Twitter users, while annoyed, are giving them too much attention in both the negative and positive forms, and frankly, both of these only help Twitter. Any publicity is good publicity, especially when it comes to Twitter. I’m fed up with their lack of communication with users (try to talk to @ev or @biz - I rarely ever get a response to them, while many other companies on their own service I get an instant response from), their lack of experience and poor architecture that keeps causing these problems. It seems, while they are trying to get better, they just keep getting worse!

Just Wednesday, Twitter, while not on purpose, removed mine, and others’ followers in some sort of mistake that took a day to fix (I’m guessing someone erased too much data in the database via a bad query on live data, and they had to restore from Tape backup to get it all back). This hit the breaking point for me - they violated the most important thing to me about Twitter, my followers (which are also those I follow and have a deep interest in), and I just can’t trust that things like this won’t keep happening in the future. They crossed the line, whether on purpose or not, and it’s time for me to take action.

I’ve endured them being down in times I needed them most. I’ve endured them removing API features from us developers with little to no notice. I’ve endured them launching things into production without telling developers or warning users. I’ve endured their lack of a proper staging environment and other simple architectural issues that they still have yet to fix (I’m still not convinced they’re not developing in their production environment!). I’ve endured their lack of a proper and regular launch schedule to warn other developers and users when new features and bug fixes are being launched into place. I’ve frankly, been too patient with them and I’m fed up with it.

Unfortunately, after only one day I realized I could not do it cold-Turkey. I have a good number of followers on Twitter that have some interest in me (and I thank you so much for that support - it really means a lot to me), and regardless of whether I want to leave or not, abandoning Twitter would mean abandoning those followers, and I just can’t do that to all of you. To me, you’re not just a number - you’re all people interested in me in some way, and I follow each of you back because of that (and will continue to do so). I do care about you, and need to do what I can to encourage you to join me in more productive, more reliable and trustworthy sources however. Here’s what I’m going to do:

I’m going to post much more on Identi.ca

My followers from Twitter are already very quickly joining the open source communications and micro-blogging service, Identi.ca. I use identi.ca with Twhirl and have it open at the same time I have Twitter and FriendFeed open. I will be posting to identi.ca much more often - follow me there so you don’t miss anything!

Why identi.ca? Distributed or not distributed (some argue it isn’t, which they have a point), identi.ca is open source. This means I, as a developer, can actually have some sort of chance at giving back if things ever go wrong. Everything’s plain, simple, and out in the open. I know Evan, the identi.ca founder, has also been very open with the community and has maintained that communication. I don’t get that from Twitter, at least not on an individual level. Also, identi.ca, like Twitter, now imports to FriendFeed, and now satisfies my status updating needs to initiate conversation (which is what FriendFeed satisfies).

I’m going to be much more involved on FriendFeed

On Wednesday at F8 I realized something significant - I was using FriendFeed as my primary communication mechanism throughout the day, and I really wasn’t missing Twitter much by doing so (and most of it from my cell phone). FriendFeed, frankly, is much more viral and advantageous to my blog and brand than Twitter because every time anyone likes or comments on an item I post or comment on, that item goes right back to the top of the feeds for all my friends. It brings instant exposure, and in fact, for many posts on this blog I get more traffic on FriendFeed than Google, Twitter, or any other service out there. FriendFeed takes power away from the A-listers and puts it right back in your hands - it can happen to you too, and very easily!

Some people, for whatever reason, won’t give up Twitter

As long as the majority of my followers remain on Twitter and don’t join FriendFeed or Identi.ca, I still have an obligation to you, and frankly, I’m outvoted at the moment until the scale tips. I’ll still follow your Tweets on Twitter, respond to your @replies, and direct messages, assuming you’re not already on the other services. You gave me your attention and I need to continue to give you mine. For the most part, my blog posts will keep posting there (although they are also on FriendFeed - discuss below!). Please don’t hesitate to contact me - I respect you having your own opinion. I hope this post can convince you otherwise however.

SocialToo.com still lives! It has to.

The fact of the matter is, there is still a large audience using Twitter and frankly, there’s a business opportunity there as long as people are still there. I built SocialToo.com to work across many social networks, and as you switch, so will SocialToo.com. For now though, there’s an opportunity, and Twitter will still be a part of that opportunity, as will Identi.ca, Facebook, and even FriendFeed in the future. It is already powering hundreds of Twitter accounts helping you follow those that are also interested in you and I have no intention in giving that up. If I can do my part in making Twitter a better place, I’ll at least try, so long as they let me. I’ve actually got a really cool new feature that will be released soon for both Twitter and Identi.ca.

I will not give Twitter any more attention!

I’ve given Twitter too much attention, both positive and negative already. We as bloggers, if we’re frustrated with the service, need to take a stand, and my hiatus starts with blogging about Twitter, and that happens right now, cold-turkey. This, unless Twitter does something absolutely profound, will be my last post about Twitter.

How Twitter can get me back

Twitter needs to do something profound - they need to show they have the experience necessary to protect those that follow and are interested in me. Twitter needs to open up more - let us into what you’re doing. Allow other services to sync with my updates in a federated, open manner. Open your source code like identi.ca. Any one or two of these will do, but, frankly, I’ve been disappointed too many times. Twitter has to gain my trust back, if some other service doesn’t beat them to it. Show your support by joining me on Identi.ca at:

http://identi.ca/jessestay

Or, more importantly, join me at FriendFeed at:

http://friendfeed.com/jessestay

I hope to see more of you there!

I knew Twitter had hit mainstream when I was Twittering about speaking in Church awhile back, and the CIO of a major Church organization Twitter’d me back, wishing me luck, while he himself was in church. Both he and I some times Twitter about the current sermon or teaching going on in our individual congregations and more - it’s quite frankly, an excellent tool to share with others of like beliefs and even outside your faith inspiring things you may learn. I’ve seen this from others as well, across boundaries of many different faiths - it’s a very common thing to see on Sundays on Twitter and FriendFeed. On Sundays, Twitter often becomes, “Church Day”, at least amongst many of my friends of different Faiths on Twitter.

Many people may gasp at this idea, saying, “What? You use your cell phone to Twitter in Church?”, but I’m not so sure it could be such a bad thing for the reasons I mention above. True, some times it is easy to get distracted, check e-mail, or FriendFeed, or other things going on and that takes some control. I also have to remember to turn off the sound on my wife’s cell phone so if/when I Twitter her phone doesn’t go off in the middle of sacrament/communion because she receives my Twitters on her cellphone (true story!). I do find it an easy way to study the scriptures in church without having to bring a whole book with me. With the iPhone’s new 3G speeds it’s also a great tool to be able to cross-reference and research the topics I’m learning - I’m a stickler for ensuring only the facts are being learned!

However, as I said, without restraint, my cellphone can be a distraction. Not only that, but the mere appearance of me constantly on it can bring an irreverance to the service that perhaps shouldn’t be there. I still can’t help wonder if it may be better just to leave the phone at home. To figure this out, I asked my friends on Twitter and FriendFeed how they use their cellphones in Church. I got a variety of great responses:

jtzemp - I work with the youth, and so I don’t believe in setting a double standard. If they can’t use them to be checking sports scores, texting friends, etc. than I’m not going to either. I have five rules: 1.) It’s OK in emergencies 2.) If it is being used to enhance the experience we’re all sharing, it’s ok. (calling people to get them to activities, finding out if someone is up for a visit, etc). It’s not ok to isolate yourself from people present to have conversations with people who aren’t present. The people you are with right now are the most important people to you right now. 3.) Following up on assignments is OK. I participate in a lot of meetings, and I do text people to remind them of, and follow up on completion of assignments. 4.) It’s _not_ ok in very sacred settings. It takes your mind off the spiritual experience and leaves you spiritually distracted. 5.) If you use your PDA/iPhone to store scriptures/notes/etc. It is ok to use it for that purpose only in appropriate settings. My $0.02.

LdsNana-AskMormon - Calender items, notes and on occasion accessing the scriptures via the Internet….. but NEVER texting.

Justin Hileman - i think appropriate use of technology can be beneficial… i’m far more likely to remain engaged when i’m looking up supplementary material or cross-referencing scripture. with a phone/pocket pc/iPhone i can look up that quote that i can almost remember, i can jot down notes so i’ll remember later. and i’m far less likely to carry a pad of paper to church with me.

Louis Gray - I used to bring the Treo, to have the standard works, hymns, lessons on. Now, I leave all the gadgets at home. You know I’d be Friendfeeding during communion and on Fast Sunday.

Ontario Emperor - If I am alone at church, I will occasionally tweet and/or friendfeed the highlights from the sermon. http://friendfeed.com/e/17edcd…

LGR - Occasionally, if I have the kids on my own in the parents room I will check email, and do some RSS reading while I am watching the kids. I can’t hear the sermon in the parents room unfortunately so I play with the kids and check things on my cell.

James Hull - Never. In the past I have used it to save notes or ideas that may pop into my head, but lately I turn the thing off on the way in and back on on the way out.

the JoshMeister - I like jtzemp’s comments. I carry 3 phone/PDA-type devices with me (yes, I know it sounds silly, but there’s a reason for each device). I use my personal PDA (not a phone) for notes, scriptures, lesson manuals, hymns, and my calendar. I use my Treo (my work PDA-phone which is Internet-enabled but not calling-enabled) to look up talks on lds.org during meetings when appropriate e.g. if a particular talk is the main focus of a lesson, and also for typing notes during General/Stake Conference…

…And finally, I use my personal cell phone only before/after church, or to add a church member’s phone number.

Harvey Simmons - This will probably blur the definition of “in church,” but I’m on the AV team, so we send texts from the sound board to the video room all the time. We just turn our ringers off. At the same time, we occasionally remind people that they could be on camera at any time, so they shouldn’t text or talk on cellphones during service. Last week, the Assistant Pastor’s phone rang during communion service. It was hilarious.

James Andrews - My church is wireless and I love looking up scripture in service, though my wife says it looks like i’m checking my email. My pastor is pretty progressive and I am sure knows what Im doing

klecu - I quite often use my pocket PC in church…to read the Bible of course

Jeff P. Henderson - Maybe there is an online church you could join. Then it would be totally appropriate to use your iPhone there
Akula - I occasionally check email although I shouldn’t. If I had an iPhone I’d probably use it too much at church.

This Twitter and FriendFeed Phenomena is still quite new. I’m sure as it pans out we’ll see more and better uses for it in Church. In the meantime I’m going to watch it with a close eye and see if I can figure out a middle-ground that keeps the sacredness of Church and still adds to it through use of new technology. With the new iPhone App store it could actually be quite interesting to see if any “Church-apps” come to fruition as more people use it. I’m a believer, that’s for sure!

We’re still discussing this on FriendFeed - you can keep contributing to the conversation here.

Photo Credit Peyton Knight

On the heels of a post this morning by Biz Stone, it appears Twitter is beginning to bring the rate limit for posts through the Twitter API back to the 70 per hour it used to be. For the last several months, Twitter has brought that limit down to only 20 requests per hour. Per the Twitter developers mailing list just now, Twitter has now raised that limit to 40, and will gradually be raising it back up to 70 in the upcoming week.

This is welcome news in the week of months of API and service outages. What this means is that you, as the user will no longer see the “Rate Limit Exceeded” error you may be seeing through clients like Twhirl. In regards to the API this leaves mainly just the XMPP stream that they need to re-enable for developers - this may not be happening any time soon however, as Twitter may be looking to only enable a select few developers access to the stream.

Has this request limit affected you as a developer? How about as a user?

Just today, the New York Times did a post on Alex Payne, a “24-year old internet engineer” who created a site called, “DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com“. This site allows anyone to type in a URL and the site will tell you if it’s just you or down for the entire web. In all it’s a pretty useful site I would think.

The article goes on to show all kinds of examples of companies that have had this issue internally and how useful this site could be. What the article did not cover however is that Payne, the “24-year old internet engineer” is also one of the lead Engineers at Twitter, a site that is very familiar with this issue.

Twitter, known for its very frequent outages and user frustration, may be his biggest user. Leave it to Twitter to solve the world’s problems regarding determining if a site is truly up or not! The one thing we can now say is that at least one employee at Twitter will become successful as a result of Twitter’s outages. Thanks to Techmeme and the New York Times for making my day on this one!

UPDATE: it looks like the New York Times article has updated to state that Payne works for Twitter. It was much more funny when that wasn’t made known

Today I was introduced to a new service called identi.ca, which claims to provide Twitter-like functionality, in a nice, Open Source interface. The service implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol which, from their FAQs, states, “you can have friends on other microblogging services
that can receive your notices.” This means complete transparency and no reliance on any one service to trust your data with. I am unable to find any other services that have utilized this protocol, however.

The service seems to maintain an open atmosphere across the board. They publish all the details of the code identi.ca is based on, stating they run on the Open Source microblogging platform, Laconica. They state that “soon” they plan to implement SMS updates and notifications, a Twitter-compatible API, Maps, Cross-posting to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc., Facebook integration, Hashtags, Image, video, audio notices, and even a multilingual interface. Relying on the open source community, on an open standards-based platform may just put them in direct competition with Twitter very soon.

All of your updates posted to the service are under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and you have to agree to this when you sign up. They seem to remain open across the board - and this will make them successful. I have talked previously about how the mistake Twitter is making is that they are not open enough - they are not basing their protocols on open standards and open techniques of web development. It is showing now, as they are stuck fixing their own problems as the world watches. With a service like this, were it to go down, ideally other services would also sync data and you would not be without service when one service goes down. This is powerful!

The founder of identi.ca is ironically named Evan - they seem to be going head-to-head with Twitter in an Open platform. Based on my experience with open standards in the past, I can already tell which one has the strongest potential. They state to have 1,000 users already and are growing very fast (in Evan’s words). I look forward to seeing them grow, and hopefully contributing as I can - will you join me? You can find me at http://identi.ca/jessestay.

With all the frustration lately about Twitter going down, disabling features, and developers leaving the service, people still keep coming back for some reason. Frankly, there just isn’t anything that can fully replace Twitter. I think people have simply gotten so used to Twitter and have figured out their own ways to use the service, that moving to a new service and spending time adopting new ways of organizing communication is just too much for most people. Bring in FriendFeed - now, I know I have said previously that FriendFeed is not a competitor to Twitter, but they are getting closer and closer to being a reasonable alternative every day. At the same time, FriendFeed is just more stable and encourages conversation in ways that Twitter just can’t (especially when @replies are down!). I’d like to share with you a few ways that you can use FriendFeed to kick that Twitter habit, and utilize the full power of FriendFeed at the same time.

Not on FriendFeed yet? Sign up and see what you’re missing!

Joining is the first step. Be sure you have given it all of your favorite Social Networks, and especially your Twitter credentials. Don’t be overwhelmed though - the tips I’m about to give you will help ease some of that frustration, and most importantly, try it out for a little, give it a chance like you did Twitter, and you’ll begin to see why it’s so powerful. Remember that when you joined Twitter it didn’t make much sense at first either. It took getting in and using it for awhile before you were able to realize how powerful it actually was.

Find all your Twitter friends that are on FriendFeed and add them

One of my biggest worries of moving to another service from Twitter is abandoning the near 900 people following me. For some of you this number is much smaller, and therefore should be a little easier to migrate. There is a nice little program by Eric at InternetDuctTape (click on the link to get it yourself!) that searches through all your Twitter contacts, and then using the Google Social Graph API, identifies which of those are on FriendFeed. Run this now (sorry, Windows only - I ran mine on Parallels), and it will automatically send friend requests to all of your Twitter friends that are currently on FriendFeed.

This is only the first step to migrating your Twitter network over to FriendFeed and using the service on its own. Only those Twitter friends that are already on FriendFeed will be able to see your updates (you can actually post updates via the “share” button in FriendFeed), but now you can tell those other Twitter friends to come follow you on FriendFeed if they want to continue receiving your updates and join the conversation. The advantage FriendFeed gives you is that for every update and/or link posted to the service, users can actually have a discussion underneath that link as a community instead of guessing what it is they are talking about.

I fully expect someone to write a script (maybe socialtoo.com?) that will automatically post your “shares” on FriendFeed out to your Twitter account, with a link back to FriendFeed to discuss the shared post eventually. Look to see that soon, and all your posts can now be on FriendFeed with no worries of abandoning your Twitter network.

Get an imaginary friend (or two or three)

FriendFeed supports the concept of “Imaginary Friends” for all of those you follow on Twitter and other services that aren’t on FriendFeed. Simply click on the “friend settings” tab in the upper-right of FriendFeed, then click “imaginary” in the navigation. Click on “Create an imaginary friend”, and follow the instructions to create a name for that friend and what network they belong to. Now, those friends’ updates will appear in your list of other friends’ updates on FriendFeed, and you won’t miss a thing!

Reply to your friends’ Twitter statuses via FriendFeed

Now that you have all your Twitter friends in FriendFeed, on any post they make, you can reply, directly from FriendFeed! On any Twitter post, click on “Comment”, then comment and check “Also send this comment as an @reply twitter from (your username)”. Now, when you post your comment, not only will it appear under that user’s Twitter post in FriendFeed for other FriendFeed members to discuss, but it will also send an @reply to Twitter itself so the conversation continues on Twitter as well! I only suggest using this for those Twitter friends that are not on FriendFeed, because, hey - you’re trying to give up Twitter, aren’t you?

Get very familiar with FriendFeed mobile

Just today FriendFeed announced a new iPhone version of its service. The new design is very intuitive and easy to navigate, and I can only imagine will get better over time! The coolest feature is a link to their built-in ability to send photos to FriendFeed that you take on your cell phone. If you send any photo to yourusername+your_api_key@mail2ff.com it will automatically post it to FriendFeed for others to discuss and talk about. The iPhone version gives you the e-mail address you need to send to, but you can also get your api key via https://friendfeed.com/account/api if you don’t have an iPhone.

The other service to check out if you don’t have an iPhone is fftogo.com. FFtoGo.com gives a nice, mobile-formatted version of FriendFeed to your cell phone. Up until today I was using this, and it works very well at viewing what your friends are posting and discussing, what you’re posting and discussing, and who is discussing on the things you post.

Install the FriendFeed Comments Plugin for your blog

Okay, there’s really nothing in Twitter that compares with this or can compare with this, but it does demonstrate the power of FriendFeed. The FriendFeed comments plugin enables you as a blogger to allow your readers to comment to the blog post right on FriendFeed, and read what is being said on FriendFeed, right on your blog! It also shows who has liked it, and lets your users like it right from your blog. Ideally, you could really remove the current comments on your blog and completely replace it with this. You can see this in action right below this blog post above the Disqus comments by clicking the “show” link next to “Join the Discussion on FriendFeed”. Comment there and then go to FriendFeed and check it out!

RSS, RSS, RSS! — Learn to organize your FriendFeed data

Almost every page on FriendFeed has an associated RSS feed with it. Someone asked me today why Summize doesn’t support FriendFeed - that’s because FriendFeed has Summize functionality built into it! Open any page in FriendFeed, then scroll all the way down to the bottom, and click on one of the links next to “other ways to read this feed”. You can have new items on that page sent to your RSS Reader, Facebook, Google Reader or iGoogle, or even e-mail!

This has power. One way I use Twitter is I follow all those that follow me (using socialtoo.com), but I send all those I really need to pay attention to, and that are most interesting to my cell phone via SMS. FriendFeed doesn’t support SMS, but it does have another way to send you new updates of a particular user. Simply click on any username in FriendFeed (or just go to http://friendfeed.com/username or http://friendfeed.com/username/discussion if you want all of their likes and comments as well), and now all of their posts will be delivered to you via RSS! Add to this the power of Google Reader on your Cell phone and you have a superb way of staying up to date on the discussion of the most interesting people you follow.

One other way to utilize this is through the search box on the right of FriendFeed. Type in any text in the search box that you want to “track” (note that track is currently broken on Twitter), add the resulting page to your RSS Reader, and now all found discussions with that term contained (for instance, your brand, or your competitor’s brand) will be delivered automatically to your RSS Reader. This is powerful!

Use Twhirl for all the rest!

Now that you’re paying attention to all of the most interesting people you are following, you’ve brought over all those you can from Twitter, you’re tracking the terms you want, and you’ve integrated FriendFeed commenting onto your blog, you may want to skim over all the rest.

While the FriendFeed UI should be sufficient, Twhirl is an unbelievable tool for general FriendFeed use. From Twhirl you can skim over all of your friends’ posts and comment and discuss on the interesting posts, or just watch all of the posts you have sent to FriendFeed along with anything you have liked or commented on. If you click on the “Me” tab and “like” the interesting posts of your friends, you can then track the conversations that go on within each of those posts that you “like”.

USE the service!

The most important advice I can give to any Twitter user looking to move over to FriendFeed is to use the service! More people will talk about your posts, more people will “like” your posts, and your experience and conversation will get much better the more you use the service. If you just use it as an aggregator and don’t “like” or comment it will still be an interesting tool, but it just can’t replace Twitter until you start using it.

In the meantime, come follow me on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/jessestay. Join the discussion below! I think you’ll start seeing me much more over there, and much less on Twitter as we all begin to utilize the full functionality of FriendFeed. Let’s just face it - we’re all getting tired of this Twitter downtime!

UPDATE: Sasha Kovaliov made the point (on FriendFeed) that I had the fftogo.com link wrong (I had it as ff2go.com). Thanks for the correction, and I’ve corrected it now.

I’m going to dub this Part 2 of my Twitter Love/Hate fest - this should be my last installment for awhile on this topic, I hope. In reality, I really love Twitter. I have a good network on Twitter and frankly, I wouldn’t have met many of you if it weren’t for Twitter. Twitter, in many ways, has changed my career. For that reason I really don’t want to see it fail. It is perhaps this reason that I am so critical of it at times - it’s my hope that someone at Twitter can read these and at least see what the world is really thinking, hoping, and wishing at a given point in time about how their service is performing and being perceived.

Twitter is still continuing to fail developers!

It’s examples like the one I learned about recently where the service, Gridjit, was put offline entirely because of a rash decision on Twitter’s part to remove a feature from Twitter’s API with little to no notice for the developers to respond. In the time Gridjit was down, they have since added FriendFeed support, and I’m willing to bet they have other strategies that don’t include Twitter. Now that Twitter has re-enabled that feature, they are now back up and running, but Gridjit is just another example of the frustration that is occurring amongst developers in the Twitter development community.

Just today, for example, I noticed Twhirl was no longer working with @replies. I remember seeing posts on the Twitter blog recently stating that the @replies tab would be removed, but I remember no notice to developers stating that the features that enable this on clients like Twhirl would be disabled in the API (they did let us know the API was down today though - still no notice it would be down when they took down the replies tab, and nothing to the developer mailing list that I’m aware of).

Twitter tries, but not quite enough

I mentioned last week that Twitter was hiring on their site, but it just wasn’t enough because I think the problems they have exist at the management level. True, they even hired 3 new individuals recently, but they are developers used to being managed, not managing large groups of other developers. Twitter really needs one or two individuals at the top that have true Enterprise-level experience managing these types of IT issues, and very large groups of developers. Remember, Twitter isn’t just the developers that work for Twitter, but the vast group of developers that are also writing applications for their API. The individual in charge of development and IT efforts at Twitter has to have strong experience in managing very large development teams, and working with a very large user-base, in which any change to any part of the system could effect. Twitter needs a staging environment in place, and a system of testing every single change that goes into place before it actually goes out live into the production environment.

They are showing some promise though!

Just this week Twitter announced the inclusion of 2 new investment partners in their list of investors. One of those, Jeff Bezos, does have experience managing the types of issues and large development audiences that Twitter lacks. This is a huge move for Twitter, and long overdue! Jeff will bring Amazon’s firm experience in scalable web environments, and I hope, enable Twitter to enter the cloud more than they currently are, and reduce the tough scaling issues they are experiencing right now.

You can bet you’ll see Twitter begin adopting Amazon’s AWS Cloud services here soon now that Bezos is on board. Amazon has the capability to scale almost instantly as traffic spikes hit, and they seem to be doing it better than any other right now. Twitter really needs this service!

Why I think they’ll still survive, no matter how many developers leave

Twitter is a Marketer’s Paradise. Twitter is full of content about the every-day life of millions of individuals and their friends, who they connect and communicate with, and what their frustrations and interests are. Businesses are beginning to embrace this and use services such as Summize to track information about their Brand, their image, and even their competitors that they could never track before. Businesses can finally track real people instead of just “visitors”.

This is powerful and valuable information to many businesses out there. Because of this it doesn’t matter how many times Twitter goes down or how many developers stay or go from Twitter. So long as users still have networks on Twitter and the Twitter user-base continues to rise as it appears to still be doing, businesses like H&R Block and Comcast and even NASA will still flock to Twitter as a valuable tool in gathering data about their customers and fans. These businesses have it in their best interest to see Twitter succeed, and you better bet they’ll do their best to help out in that effort. Twitter isn’t going anywhere my friends, and I still haven’t retracted from that statement.