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The "Community WordPress Facebook Plugin" – Why You Should Contribute

Posted on September 3, 2008 by jessestay

There are rumors that Facebook has been working on their own WordPress plugin for Facebook. This is troubling for those of us developers that are developing for Facebook Connect, as it shows that Facebook could in one sweep, wipe any developer writing for the Facebook Connect platform out without any advanced notice. It only appeared that in the past, this type of thing only happened on the Facebook website itself, as Facebook has a right to, but I’ve seen it myself with my own development on Facebook Connect today.

Fair enough. I like competition, although I’d love this to be a community effort. So, since we know Facebook is working on their own WordPress plugin for Facebook, and we know Facebook isn’t willing to divulge their code yet. Since I’ve already devoted 20 or so of my own hours to the exact same project with no knowledge from Facebook, and am just now learning that Facebook was working on this behind the scenes incognito with no involvement from the community, I’d like to release my own plugin to the public, under the GPL v2.0 today, in the hopes the public can help with development and further building of this plugin, as a community, not just under Facebook’s roof.

It’s very troubling to see Facebook develop on external apps outside of Facebook like this – it only shows that Facebook is not afraid to encroach on other developers’ projects and that any one of us is at risk of having a useful project, our time and effort (I had no intentions on making money from this), wiped out in an instant. Sure, Facebook has every right to compete, but the least courtesy of notifying developers it already knows would be competition. With such a WordPress plugin this also encroaches on Six Apart’s announced integration with Facebook Connect, and puts Facebook in direct competition with Six Apart instead of making it Automattic’s problem.

It’s my sincere hope that Facebook decides not to continue such projects internally, but instead contributes to existing projects if they must do so. Facebook should in no way be competing with the developers that use their platform without warning, or risk us not being willing to contribute such things in the future. Let’s work together on this Facebook – how about a “we need help” board, or an “internal projects” board so we can know what you’re working on in advance. In this way we can work with you instead of parallel to you and hours spent doing so won’t be wasted. Or how about a little nudge to people like Six Apart saying, “we may just have to compete with you on this in the future” so their own time isn’t wasted with the integration.

Why should I keep building external web apps that integrate and send users to Facebook if Facebook is just going to replace my web apps in the end anyway?

So, I’m going to release my code here right now in hopes we can make this a community project – it requires you to set up your own app for your blog under the Facebook Developers site (just set your callback URL to your own website’s URL), and you must take your application key and enter it into the admin section. Only developers of the Facebook app itself can login through Facebook Connect until Facebook launches (one more advantage Facebook has over us developers – they know when they are launching, and therefore know how much time they have to develop these things, another reason to leave it to us developers in order to keep it fair). To install on your blog after doing so, just unzip the folder in your plugins folder, and activate your plugin under the plugins section in WordPress. After that, any Facebook user will be able to leave comments, under their own authentication, Facebook avatar, and name without having to re-enter it each time. We’ll be integrating this more in the future – if you can help please let me know! My project is a community project, not owned by Facebook, completely owned by me and you for the benefit of the community.

You can download it here.

You can see it in action on my test site, http://socialmediacast.staynalive.com – check out the Hello World post to see the existing comments. Note you will not be able to log in to Facebook Connect on that site because you are not a developer on the app for that site.

Now, I know I ranted a bit – it’s late, but I hope this makes some sort of sense. Am I out of line here? Should I just scrap my code completely and let Facebook do this? Is it a wise move for Facebook to keep making external apps like this that integrate with Facebook? What’s the best way for Facebook to approach this? I welcome your comments below.

I’m Changing Gears

Posted on September 2, 2008 by jessestay

I mentioned earlier I was going to announce a big change this week. I’m “on the move“, as Jeremiah Owyang would put it. Today was my first day working full time at a new Silicon Valley startup with offices here in Utah, where I will be leading their Social Product strategy moving forward. I am phasing off my regular consulting, and moving to this new Entrepreneurial effort in helping them grow.

At the moment, I can’t reveal much more, other than the fact that we’re building the next era in Interactive Entertainment on the iPhone. The company I’m working with right now started out as a client of mine, and I liked their product so much I decided it would be worth helping them out full time. I believe fully that we are going to change much of the way you watch TV today. We will be launching most likely next week, and you can follow the Twitter account @MediaMyWay to catch our launch announcement and follow our updates (I’ll also point you there from my Twitter account when we launch – we’ll announce it there first!). Other Twitter accounts you can follow for updates and “clues” are @JustintheWhitt, @Romay, and our CEO, @BradPelo.

How will this affect the other stuff I do? In reality, not much is changing, other than what I do full time. I have received permission to keep SocialToo.com going part-time, as it has, unless it takes off. Expect some very cool things to come from SocialToo in the near future – we’re working on a completely new design and a really cool new feature that will be released in the next couple weeks.

As far as my blogging and book-writing is concerned, I see nothing changing, and I intend fully to continue blogging regular, unbiased articles that I feel inspire and educate. I will disclose where necessary if I feel my current employment has any influence in what I am writing. I still hope to continue writing in other capacities as well, as long as speak as I’m asked to do (I’m speaking in Dallas next week to the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, in fact – come see me speak!).

So, keep watching the @MediaMyWay Twitter account, and you can also follow this blog and I’ll be sure you’re aware of the latest of our happenings (we’ll have a company blog here shortly, which I’ll let you know about). In the meantime I’ll keep posting regular, educational, and original content as I always have and always will. “Stay” Tuned!

Happy Blog Day 2008

Posted on September 1, 2008 by jessestay

For those unaware, today is “Blog Day“, a day intended to allow bloggers to share their favorite blogs in hopes that readers can diversify the blogs they currently read and learn of other unknowns that they may not yet be subscribed to. I figure I’d join in on the cause several others have joined today, and share my favorite blogs. I’m going to take a slightly different spin on it and I’ll share with you my top 5 “shared” items from Google Reader (in the last 30 days) based on Google Trends (you can find these statistics for yourself via the “Trends” link to the left in Google Reader).

Picture 13.png (Please note – you can see the top recommendations I re-share on Reader in the image to the left – I did not include those in this list.) If you’d like to follow what I share via Google Reader, please feel free to subscribe via my Google Reader shared items feed. Here are the top 5:

#1. LouisGray.com (Subscribe via RSS) — Okay, my #1 was actually TechCrunch, but they get enough attention. For those unaware, recently I became a guest-blogger over at LouisGray.com. In the last year I became aware of Louis Gray and his blog (I think it was through Robert Scoble, in fact) and realized he has extremely insightful content. He’s also extremely transparent and open about his blog and statistics, pointing out other blogs that he likes, and helping other up and coming blogs he thinks are important get attention. About a month or two ago he approached me and asked me if I would like to guest-blog regularly on his site and I jumped at the chance – it was an extreme honor that he would think of me. If you’re looking for the next Robert Scoble, Louis is your guy – not only is he smart, insightful, up on all the latest news and technology, but he has a ton in common with me as well. Like me, he’s a faithful Mormon and a very strong family man. We share many of the same views on technology and what’s coming up next. Not only that, but we’re even the same age!

#2. InsideFacebook.com (Subscribe via RSS) — I have also guest-blogged at InsideFacebook, but Justin Smith has long had one of my favorite Facebook blogs (I also recommend you check out Nick O’Neill’s AllFacebook.com (Subscribe via RSS)). His posts are well thought-out, and he covers many subjects in detail about latest Facebook news and information.

#3. CenterNetworks.com (Subscribe via RSS) — Allen Stern, of CenterNetworks.com, is hilarious! His posts are put in a very informative manner and in a way that keeps you entertained, while in many cases, educate you at the same time. Allen has a lot of experience and is a good guy to get advice from. In general, Allen’s posts are in the form of a video and short text description, and the subjects range anywhere from how to monetize your blog, to making fun of the latest news, to showing opinion on what FriendFeed or other sites could do better.

#4. Oh, Identica! (Subscribe via RSS) — My friend, Marina Martin, put this together in a response to her leaving Twitter and embracing Identi.ca, as a resource to others trying to figure out how they can use Identi.ca as well. Previously, Marina had a similar blog for Twitter, and the name comes from the fact that she and her boyfriend met through Twitter. Oh, Identi.ca! covers almost everything you need to know with tips and tricks on what you can do with Identi.ca that will make it useful.

#5. FaceReviews.com (Subscribe via RSS) — Rodney Rumford started this as a great way to show off new Facebook applications and reviews of those applications. Recently he has also started covering Twitter and other subjects, all with superb content and research behind them. Rodney’s been doing this stuff for a long time, and his experience shows.

These are some of my own favorites. They are all based on the number of shares on Google Reader. Some day I will have to post some of my non-shared favorites that perhaps don’t post as often. Hopefully some of you that read this can now share yours – I’d love to have some new blogs on this list next year!

Why Do I See So Many Open Source Advocates Using Twitter?

Posted on August 28, 2008 by jessestay

As I am speaking, Utah is having their yearly Open Source conference. If you’re in Utah or outside Utah (most of my audience is outside Utah), it is well worth the trip with some great topics from ssh tips and tricks to WordPress Performance and Scalability by Utah’s own Joseph Scott from Automattic. I would be there myself but I have deadlines I have to meet this week (I have a big announcement to make next week which will explain my lack of time this week). However, as I was tracking the updates from the conference, I noticed there seem to be way more people updating from Twitter vs. the Open Source-based blogging tool, Identi.ca. In fact, I notice many Open Source proponents even outside Utah embracing Twitter over the Open Source-based Identi.ca and I wonder why.

Now, I wasn’t paying attention during OSCON so I don’t know if it was the same there, but I’m willing to bet there was a lot of activity going on within the Twitter network there that really should have been happening over on Identi.ca. I’m wondering if it’s just lack of education about Identi.ca, or if our views of the principles behind Open Source have changed.

I remember a day where in each company I worked for I would do all I could to try and get them to let me run Linux on my desktop. I still run vim and I still run open tools like Apache, MySQL, and Perl. In some (remember Red Hat 5?), I was making a sacrifice by doing so, because I knew I had complete flexibility to make the changes and configurations necessary to make it do what I wanted to do if it did not yet do it.

When I was an Engineer at Backcountry.com we thrived on this principle. It actually made us more productive as a company because when we used Open Source software, we could configure it the way we wanted when it wasn’t working the way we wanted it to as a company. This would have costed us hundreds of thousands of dollars in custom software changes if we used a shrink-wrapped solution. Not only that but we could give back to a great cause if it didn’t meet our needs, and in fact we gave back quite a few changes to the Open Source community because of this principle.

Now, if you are not one of those types that went out of your way to use open source software for the principle, and because of the reasons I mention above, then I’m not talking to you here. However, I’m calling each and every one of the Open Source advocates out that are on Twitter and have not yet tried, nor use Identi.ca on a regular basis. This is no different than running Linux on your desktop as in the examples I mentioned above. If Identi.ca is not working the way you want it to, as an Open Source Advocate and promoter, you have a responsibility to jump in and contribute the areas you don’t have access to. That’s the true spirit of Open Source, plain and simple! Here are the reasons why you can feel good using Identi.ca, or build your own Laconi.ca instance that can communicate with Identi.ca:

You own the content you post – All posts through a Laconi.ca instance are published under the Creative Commons license, meaning the publisher cannot own the content of its users. This is very much in the spirit of Open Source.

Identi.ca is based on open source software – as already mentioned, Identi.ca is based on the Laconi.ca source code. You can even set up your own instance and have it talk to other Laconi.ca instances. If you don’t like what Identi.ca does, then fix it, publish your own instance, or give back to Identi.ca!

Identi.ca talks with an Open Protocol, OpenMicroBlogging Protocol – Not only are you given source that talks this protocol, but you can write your own software that talks this protocol, and it will communicate with any other software that speaks this protocol. See my post on OpenMicroBlogger for an example of this in action. This is called “Federation”, and IMO it’s the essence of Open Standards and communication.

Identi.ca has almost all the same features as Twitter, and more – as I’ll explain in a minute, this probably doesn’t matter, but the only features it lacks are direct messaging and SMS. SMS is expensive, and most likely won’t last on even Twitter – it costs too much! Direct messaging can be resolved by means such as e-mail or text messaging in a much cleaner fashion, although there are rumors of some working on even that. What it has that Twitter doesn’t though, and this is powerful, is that all Laconi.ca instances support XMPP out of the box, which means live-streamed updates straight from users, in real-time. Not only that, but you can track those updates, as well as any update on any Laconi.ca instance via Track functionality. Also, via OMB protocol above, you can subscribe to users on other services other than Identi.ca, and vice versa.

Let’s not get me wrong here – I’m not telling you to abandon your network on Twitter. I’m saying if you support and promote Open Source standards and refuse to use an open service like Identi.ca that is based on Open standards, you are living a double standard. You can still use Twitter in the meantime. I still use Windows and Mac for functionality I don’t get on Linux until me or someone else is able to replace that functionality for something better. The concepts are the same. I still use Twitter occasionally.

Also, many are giving the excuse of, “my network is bigger on Twitter”. I’d first like to point you to my listening/follower ratio article on LouisGray.com as to how strong your network really is on Twitter, but in addition to that, let’s pull in the Linux example again. How many Linux desktops are there in the wild? How many Windows desktops are there? We use Open Source because it allows us to configure it to do what we need it to do, and often we can get the job done better because of that. We don’t care if the majority of the population is using another closed tool because we can do much more with the open tools we’re a part of.

I’d really like to see some more Open Source proponents using Identi.ca as their primary posting platform. If you would still like to use Twitter that’s fine – there’s a bridge to enable you to do that, but it’s time we stood to our principles and why we’re using Open Source in the first place. Please don’t consider this a criticism, but rather a Bearhug to come help us out in this cause.

You can find me on Identi.ca at http://identi.ca/jessestay.

Facebook Puts on Its Chain Mail

Posted on August 25, 2008 by jessestay

With all the recent talk of spam and viruses lately it appears Facebook has truly hit mainstream. You know when the spammers have hit there is truly value in a service. Today I noticed a new trend on Facebook, previously only known to the likes of Snail Mail and E-mail itself, the chain letter. It wasn’t in the form of an application or even a bot of some sort as you would expect on the service. Surprisingly, it was hand-written by who-knows-who and had somehow made it around to my wife’s cousin, who sent it to me. Subsequently, several of my other friends seem to have got it, because I received it from a few others as well.

The letter goes like this:

“Subject: ATTENTION ALL FACEBOOK MEMBERS August 20 at 8:13pmReply Attention all Facebook members.Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,There have been many members complaining that Facebookis becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason isthat there are too many non-active Facebook membersAnd on the other side too many new Facebook members.We will be sending this messages around to see if theMembers are active or not,If you’re active please sendto 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are activeThose who do not send this message within 2 weeks,The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you sendthis message to show me that your active and not deleted. Founder of FacebookMark Zuckerber”

It is sent via the traditional Facebook mail, which the API has no access. I asked my wife’s cousin if they sent it, and indeed, they actually did forward it to 15 of their friends as the e-mail directs. Therefore it appears this one, amazingly, is being spread, manually, from person to person on Facebook.

Now, I’m probably preaching to the choir here on my blog, as I sincerely hope none of you would fall for this. Typically, anything that says, “forward to x number of your friends” is not for real and you should report it or mark it as spam immediately. “Mark Zuckerber” is not going to know you forwarded it to all your friends, and Facebook is not tracking this mail in anyway. Your account will not be deleted.

This seems to go back to the days of the Microsoft lottery e-mail hoax that basically said if you forward to all (or any number of) your friends, you get entered for the chance to win a million dollars (or similar amount of money). Supposedly in this e-mail Bill Gates was able to track the e-mails you sent and they were using this to track the number of e-mails that went out.

This does beg the question though – how do normal users of Facebook know for 100% clarity that a message comes directly from Facebook, if they ever need to send something to their users? Is there an “official” method for distributing such messages? Thus far I’m only aware of various blogs on the Facebook site to announce this information.

Now, when people compare Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, I’m not quite sure this is the way he wants to be portrayed. In such a controlled environment as Facebook, do messages like this have any excuse?

Have you seen anything similar? Share your stories here. You’ll find me on Facebook at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.

Facebook Rumors, Religion, and the LDS Faith

Posted on August 21, 2008 by jessestay

It all started with this post today. A supposed “employee ‘close to the deal'” told blogger, Zach Klein (who doesn’t seem to allow comments on his blog) that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History division had made an unsolicited bid to purchase Facebook. Nothing else – no other background, no other resources to confirm the deal. Soon after, ValleyWag, the first to the scene and first large blog to publish anything about it, was blogging rumors they are well known for spreading. Soon after, Venturebeat and the Industry Standard were blogging about it, quoting Brady Brim-DeForest, who ironically was claiming this as news, not a rumor at all – I’m unaware of where he got it, but his news broke after Valleywag’s. TheInquisitr, while I’m sure had no ill-intentions, even made fun of the manner with some very radical and somewhat inaccurate claims that I know have offended some members of the LDS Faith that read the blog. The blogosphere seems to be a mess today in regards to regard for religion, faith, and respect for one another’s belief. It appears the LDS Church has become the punch-line of the blogosphere’s Jokes and I’m getting really tired of it.

Now, let’s talk about rumors. The blogosphere is known for spreading rumors – I’ve hated them from the get-go, but let’s face it, it’s a part of many blogs out there, and it may not be going away any time soon. (I think I could do an entire post about rumors in and of itself) I expect an occasional rumor about Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo, or Facebook employees leaving the company because they are mad with Executives, or even a crazy one like the iPhone 2.0 coming with 2 cameras and iChat video support. Frankly, I never share those (well, rarely), but they are fun to read because, well, they’re funny. But rumors like an entire Faith buying a huge company like Facebook are ridiculous, unfounded, and frankly offensive to me that anyone would take such a rumor seriously when the Faith is my own. It’s a religion, people – tell me one reason a religious Faith would need a social network like Facebook to further its mission. Do you seriously believe any religion would be so stupid as to try this? People would leave Facebook in droves if that were to happen, and a network like Facebook has no good way of building up the members of the Faith itself. The claim is absolutely ridiculous, and I can’t believe established bloggers are taking this serious enough to share with others! There seems to be a serious lack of understanding between the blogosphere and the LDS Faith and I’d like to figure out a way to put an end to it.

Let’s go back to earlier this year. You may remember my “Shame on You TechCrunch” post I wrote awhile back, calling out the writers at CrunchGear for an extremely biased, and very misunderstood and inconsiderate interview of Penn Juliette, in which he claimed Mormons had “magic underwear” (as a Mormon, I affirm to you, that my underwear is not magic), and went on to encourage him as he talked about how easy religious women were, degrading women at the same time. While I still will not read CrunchGear because of that, I have lifted my boycott of TechCrunch (just because there is no way to avoid it – I also did not know Arrington at all at the time), but as you can see, there is a blatent misunderstanding of the LDS Faith in the blogosphere. CrunchGear still stands by their article and has refused to make any statement to the contrary.

Now, to give credit to those that have blogged about this today, Eric Eldon (of VentureBeat) does have a great point in that the LDS Church does actively invest in stock to retain and increase the value of its members donations through Tithing, and Facebook employees are selling stock. Like Louis Gray, I too give 10% of my wages in the form of Tithing to the Church, and I sincerely hope they invest it wisely and don’t just waste it away. I know their investments are wise though, and even the “widow’s mite” is considered and cared for. The Church itself never publishes these investments and it would be impossible to know if some are in Facebook or some are in Microsoft or some are in Google. They take these donations as sacred, and every effort is taken to maintain the sacredness of those donations. However, an outright acquisition of Facebook would be proposterous and completely out of line with the Church’s history.

Every one of these bloggers could have done a simple Tweet in fact, and quickly gotten a response from Mormons on how ridiculous the claims are. Or they could have shot Louis Gray, or me, or Matt Asay, or Phil Windley, or other Mormon bloggers an e-mail asking us if the claims were true. It took me about 5-10 minutes to send an e-mail to the LDS church and get a response back (which, btw, said the claims are not true and unfounded), and in fact, the LDS Church CIO is even on Twitter – an e-mail or even simple dm to him may have done the trick.

Now, I’m not necessarily trying to call out these specific bloggers, but rather point out the problem in general – I respect most of them in fact and really enjoy their regular blog posts. I’m just trying to make a shoutout to the blogosphere that we’re here if you have questions! Let’s start an open dialogue about the Mormon Faith – do you have questions? We’d really like to answer them before you assume and blog inaccuracies in the first place. Please, don’t hesitate to contact me, Louis Gray, or any other Mormon blogger if you have any hestitancy before posting an article. It’s time we put an end to this nonsense, once and for all.

Posted on August 18, 2008 by jessestay

hash-5368341 Last week I spoke about how the ‘@’ on Twitter and other microblogging services may no longer be necessary due to the addition of the in_reply_to_status_id API call on services like Twitter and Identi.ca. In the comments of that article you mentioned several examples why that would still be necessary. I’ve spent the weekend contemplating these and still argue with a proper infrastructure these would not be necessary. In my own opinion, services like Twitter and even Identi.ca are broken because there is no easy way to tag individuals and people without cluttering up actual content with unorthodox, unorganized ways of tagging data and people. We, the users have had to come up with our own ways to do so socially, and I think that’s a hack. Let’s go over a few:

Addressing a specific person or group of people publicly.

With current infrastructure on microblogging platforms, this is the one problem that will cause people to continue to need to use the @ sign. There is no easy way currently to say you want to make sure a particular individual or group of individuals see a specific message. This is different than a reply which the recently added API calls resolve, in that these types of messages are not necessarily in reply to anyone. So instead we have to clutter up our posts by prefixing our post with the intended recipient at the beginning, whereas if a proper infrastructure were provided, we could focus solely on the content.

Facebook has overcome this pretty well with allowing you to “tag” individuals in a Facebook Note that you would like to see the message, or that might be in the message itself. Twitter, Laconi.ca, and others need to look into a new API call to allow users to tag other individuals so this is no longer needed. Imagine, for instance, if Twhirl let you choose from your list of friends and tag them in the post you are sharing. You could then have pure message in your 140 characters and not have to worry about the intended audience.

Common English (or your language) names

I mentioned before that @ wasn’t necessary, perhaps even if there weren’t an API call provided to link replies. Microblogging clients should be able to read each username and look at your friends, and tell immediately that you are referring to one of them, adding them to your list of replies.

However, this gets tricky when you get to someone with a username that is common English or even another language. For instance, what if my username were “stay”? Every time any of my friends said they were “stay”ing somewhere I would get a notification stating they were replying to me or addressing to me.

The solution for this again would be fixed with a simple person tagging system like what I recommend above. Allowing me to specify the intended users in the message would allow clients to know I was addressing those users without me having to further clutter up the actual message with meta information that doesn’t need to be there.

Hashtags

Hashtags need to be gone, plain and simple. All Twitter and Identi.ca and even FriendFeed need to add is a simple meta layer to their API, and beyond just allowing me to tag individuals to my messages, allowing me to add tag keywords to identify my message and make it more searchable. Tags clutter up our messages as well and keep us from being able to say what we need to say in 140 characters. In fact, I argue that meta layer should be completely flexibly – imagine if I could append whatever I wanted to a message. Location information, what I’m eating at the time, websites I’m surfing, etc. (I’m just listing those in theory – those could be messages themselves, but some are meta information) Part of our 140 character message should not be words not pertinent to the intended message itself.

SMS and XMPP/Track

So you ask, if we add a meta layer on top of all this, how can I then tag my messages and tag people in my messages via SMS or XMPP (Jabber)? SMS and XMPP should be treated as clients. The SMS client should be just like any other GUI client out there, just text based. I should be able to type “help” and have it give me a list of commands I can type to make it do what I want. Part of that client could be to include #hashtags and @intended’s to specify meta information about the message, but those should be part of the additional 20 characters SMS gives me outside of the 140 Characters microblogging requires. All of the same goes for XMPP. XMPP could provide an even richer experience since it isn’t bound by the 160 character limit SMS gives people. For a great example, see Dustin Sallings‘ Track XMPP clients for both Twitter and Identi.ca (Identi.ca is real time!). Type help to his client and it gives you a whole list of things you can do with it. I’m sure this could easily be expanded further to allow tagging, person tagging, and more.

Twitter and Identi.ca’s announcements supporting linking of replies via the API last week is a very welcome announcement. With just a few more tweaks I think we’re on our way to a much cleaner microblogging environment that is even more searchable, more focused on content, and definitely more organized. For now I’m stuck using ‘@’ and #hashtags.

You can follow me on identi.ca at http://identi.ca/jessestay or FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/jessestay.

With Threaded Replies, Do We Really Need the ‘@’?

Posted on August 16, 2008 by jessestay

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?