DISQUS

Evan Prodromou · 8 months ago

Hi, Dave. So, I appreciate your attention, but I think you have the wrong idea about status.net. It's not the entire plan for Laconica -- not by a long shot. The plan, in a nutshell, is "WordPress of microblogging".

That means massive adoption -- we have a goal 100M people on the OpenMicroBlogging network by 2013.* I'm tracking the successful steps of WordPress as closely as possible, and I want to have the software available in as many was as I possibly can. Here are some of those ways:

* Download the software from http://laconi.ca/ , upload it to your (public or Intranet) Web server, and run the Web-based installation program. This is pretty standard for PHP/MySQL software like WordPress, Drupal, and others, but I think this only reaches a certain percentage of people.
* Virtual appliances on a lot of platforms. I want Laconica to be launchable as EC2 AMI, VmWare virtual appliances, and Joyent Accelerator images.
* _Literal_ network appliance -- an easy-to-install piece of hardware running a LAMP stack with an easy-to-configure Laconica on the inside. Order it, drop it into your rack, configure a bit with a Web browser, off to the races.
* One-click installs on as many hosting services as we can find.
* One-click installs in as many of the Web-hosting control panels as we can find.
* Installation packages for as many major Unix-like distros as we can find: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SuSE, OpenSolaris, FreeBSD.
* Application Service Providers like status.net. We'll provide easy-to-use installs for people who want to do minor theming, choose from a selection of supported plugins, and map their own domain names to the servers. They won't have to worry about scaling, backups, upgrades, or any of that hassleful stuff. This is more or less what WordPress.com does. I think it's what you were suggesting you'd do with smallpicture.com. Our software will be Open Source, by the way: you will be able to run the same kind of service on smallpicture.

Hosting costs money. (Shock!) Letting people reimburse us for this cost of providing this kind of service is really, really straightforward and honest. If site owners want to commercialize their system with advertising, we'll have plugins to allow it. (It may be possible to have a plugin to let them charge _their_ customers for accounts -- it might not be a bad idea.)

Anybody right now can take our software, install it, and build a community. That's what Leo's done with Twit Army; what bleeper.de is doing in Germany, saigonica.com in Viet Nam, naijapulse.com in Nigeria; trymyfashion.com for fashion and www.todaysmama.com for parents. My company (and hopefully soon others) will also provide installation, customization, maintenance, service and support for people who don't want to maintain the software for themselves.

If status.net was the endgame, well, that'd be one thing. But it's just one part in a strategy to get Laconica into people's hands /by any means possible/, no matter what their level of proficiency is.

* (Some people may not know that Laconica supports federated, distributed microblogging, also supported by openmicroblogger.com and a few other experimental implementations. That means that Laconica installations aren't islands; they're nodes in an interconnected fault-tolerant network of servers. I'm also working with the JaikuEngine team to get the protocol implemented for their software.)

exador23 · 8 months ago

How coincidental! I'm an interconnected fault-tolerant network of synapses!

Frymaster · 8 months ago

Jeez, man. I should count my blessings. I didn't even know Ellen was on Twitter until I saw your tweet. Nobody retweeted it to me, but then my avatar says Burn, Hollywood, Burn.

So much of Twitter these days is about the stats and the money and the celeb. It's gross and certainly marks the beginning of the end.

But, FYI, there is a client called Twalala that lets you "mute" people or specific words as text or hashtags. http://twalala.com - made possible by the robust geekery in Providence, RI.

blacktar · 8 months ago

Dave, I'm afraid you sort of lost me here. To me you are mixing apples and oranges and then some. If you are not happy with the signal coming in through your twitter stream, do some selective defollowing. @spam is like any other spam; it's never going to go away ever - learn to live with it. As to thinking that others/brands want a twitter, you might be right that they would think of it, but I think you both would be dead wrong about the viability of such a solution. Think about it for 2 seconds. Twitter is twitter because it's twitter. Period. To think that one could set up a sustainable and equally successful clone is pretty weird. The free and open source alternatives are here, everybody's welcome to them but they are not taking off for anyone. Everybody wants to be on twitter because everybody is there, because - hypothetically - everybody can hear you, answer you directly. It's your voice, peer to peer on a levelled playing field. A walled off copy is not going to get much love and attention. Further more, twitter is IMO already infrastructure. It has been almost from the start. Look at all the tools, apps and uses revolving, evolving around it, creating value for users an non-users alike. To me it's self evident that twitter is embedding itself to the net as infrastructure. Ask yourself how life on the net was before twitter. Would you go back? Can we go back? I think not. To me twitter is not so much about a company as it is about a paradigm shift in communication. The question if the company twitter can and will survive is a trivial and irrelevant one. Twitter as a peer to peer vehicle for your individual voice, trite or not, will live on and evolve regardless of one company's success or failure. The cat is out of the bag.

Keep on posting! Alway interesting to read what's on your mind.

Albert Willis · 8 months ago

You nailed it; I couldn't agree more--right now.

Swan · 8 months ago

Great thoughts Dave. Working on a business idea right now and contemplating whether to develop the underlying infrastucture or also include the solution wrapper that will demonstrate it's value. I think that twitter had to build some UI to begin with, but agree that now they should focus on the core technology and let others handle the solutions.

I've tried becoming a FriendFeed power user a few times, but it just doesn't stick for me. Scoble seems to love it though.

Keep up the great work. I am continuing on to your other blog posts to see what other gems I can find.

dave · 8 months ago

Thanks!

I'm in favor of shipping with a UI, but ship the source code for it, so
developers have something to crib from.

The original Mac shipped with MacWrite and MacPaint. Without those
developers wouldn't have had any idea how to interpret Inside Macintosh.

kidmercury · 8 months ago

great post dave. i think the issue is first in finding the right content management system for a niche community. for instance, i agree it makes sense for you and the demographics you listed to have their own niche twitters. but i think you also need (or will want) a bunch of other things, like your own niche digg. perhaps even your own niche facebook.

so i think first we need the foundation, the platform, the operating system, that will enable all this crap to be integrated. the box that we can plug a niche twitter into, a niche digg into, etc.

if we find the right solution for this, i think we'll be on the right track to finding the right solution to a lot of other key issues that are currently up in the air -- such as data portability, identity management, and even legal issues regarding who owns what in a niche community.

dave · 8 months ago

Exactly right. Let's get going. I think the FF guys could do it, but they're far from the only ones who know how to do scalable back-ends and APIs. But they have a really good start. Hope they're listening.

Chris Kim A · 8 months ago

On the one hand, it's the 'end of Twitter', but on the other -- everybody wants to make their own Twitter? Not sure I'm getting this part of it.

The most exciting thing is the brilliant position the tech community is in (still, for the time being, somewhat) to keep control of how much of the 'mainstream' it wants to incorporate, rather than letting the media dictate what we want (and what's important, valuable, etc). This may be as equal as the access ever gets. I hope we can set aside the 'eat or be eaten' fears long enough to hold on to what we have left and use it well.

anonontheashram · 8 months ago

No one has figured out how in this space to enable an honest non-spammer type such as myself to build a nice little business off this technology. Even worse, no one has figured out how to sell a service to a mainstream publication that wants to establish a news network without all the crap that's showing up on twitter.com.

Dave I had a CNN stringer from down here in San Diego come by to shoot a segment on housing forf aging parents and what I did for MaForbes. After she had fiulmed her segment i spent aabot five minutes talking to her and remembered how much fun it was to be a stringer with paying clients that trustedme to find special interes news and features.

As a rersult of that brief conversation on Monday i began thinking about your posts on citizen journalism and how this would play into the stringer's business model.
I think she is someone you may want to talk to soon. I'll email her contact information to you separately.

Best,
jim Forbes

abrudtkuhl · 8 months ago

Excellent post Dave.. you hit it on the head with "And for gods' sakes, stay in the background, don't compete with your users."

I think FriendFeed is doing a great job at that..

But the main point in building a platform and/or infrastructure is something both are missing - and I think the folks at Laconica have gotten the closest to.

The technology should be ubiquitous and defined by the people - and Twitter is going about that approach in exactly the opposite way - as you've mentioned.

The FriendFeed guys are brilliant and have built a killer web service. If they can flip that into a technology platform anyone can use they are on to something really powerful.

Killer post Dave - one that needed written.

ryantate · 8 months ago

(Update: OK I brought myself to read it through (kind of an accident since it was reformatted and I didn't reconize it) and the BSG half spoiler I complained about before is not that bad. Last time I immediately averted my eyes -- too many bad experiences elsewhere with e.g. knowing the end of the Sopranos way in advance.)

jjones · 8 months ago

Hi Dave,

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900 by L. Frank Baum was written as commentary on the monetary system, and chronicled the populist peoples party movement that was challenging the banking monopoly in the late 19th century. The Scarecrow represented the farmers, the Tin Woodman the industrial workers, and the Lion was the silver advocate William Jennings Bryan. Of course the wiked witch of the east had to be the bankers. Dorothy's shoes were silver in the book. They made them Ruby in the 1939 movie, because it was the first technicolor movie and they wanted more color.

There is an interesting book entitled The web of debt by Ellen Hodgson Brown that relates the tale to the current monetary crisis. Well worth reading if you enjoy history. http://www.webofdebt.com/

-Jeff

harrisj · 8 months ago

This article from 1994 takes a pretty critical look at the assertion of parallels between Populism and the Wizard of Oz. It's not whether or not they can be asserted (as the Dark Side of the Moon game shows, people can find connections pretty easily that were not deliberate), but there is no evidence to suggest that any parallels were intended by the author and instead are more the result of correlations made by Henry Littlefield in the 60s

http://www.halcyon.com/piglet/Populism.htm

My favorite quote from the piece: "Thomas A. Bailey once suggested that we set up a computer network to keep track of misinformation that has been corrected--sort of a national clearinghouse for discredited myths. Is it time to move Littlefield to the computer trashpile of misinformation?"

Yeah, that computer network would be great...

jjones · 8 months ago

Other people have made the correlations as well. Whether imagined or not, they seem to fit very well. From the book The Web of Debt:

The economic allusions in Baum's tale were first observed in 1964 by a schoolteacher named Henry Littlefield, who called the story "a parable on Populism," referring to the People's Party movement challenging the banking monopoly in the late nineteenth century.1 Other analysts later picked up the theme. Economist Hugh Rockoff, writing in the Journal of Political Economy in 1990, called the story a "monetary allegory."2 Professor Tim Ziaukas, writing in 1998, stated:

"The Wizard of Oz" . . . was written at a time when American society was consumed by the debate over the "financial question," that is, the creation and circulation of money. . . . The characters of "The Wizard of Oz" represented those deeply involved in the debate: the Scarecrow as the farmers, the Tin Woodman as the industrial workers, the Lion as silver advocate William Jennings Bryan and Dorothy as the archetypal American girl.3

harrisj · 8 months ago

I have no doubt that later people have observed parallels to populism. Just like people have observed the uncanny correlations between scenes in the Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon. But I wasn't arguing that it can't be interpreted or appropriated as a populist parable, I was arguing against the assertion that it was explicitly written by the author as such. I still haven't seen any evidence to support that and some pretty strong evidence against it.

Yes, I am splitting hairs. Sorry, that's just the kind of person I am. It's just this is the process in which random flights of fancy become ossified into historical "facts" and that makes me grumpy.

jjones · 8 months ago

Yes. I left some un-split hairs on the table for you, but the appropriation sure makes the The Web of Debt more fun to read.

-Jeff

Bill L · 8 months ago

There already is a network to keep track of misinformation. It's called Scopes.com. Another one that can offer the same type protection when it's not under heavy attack by people trying to project their prejudices is called Wikipedia.

danlyke · 8 months ago

When I first started using Twitter, it felt like a lower spam version of IRC. Then my family started using Facebook, and I got involved with that, noticed that everyone was pushing their Twitter updates to Facebook (and Identi.ca and who knows what else), so I started reading with Gwibber (that coalesces all of the identical updates from all of those services), and because I hate giving away my data wrote a little program to update all of those services at once while logging my update locally.

A few days ago I made that app update my main blog. Today I'm going to put RSS feeds on my more personal blog, and I'll split out the FaceTwit stuff to a separate RSS feed there.

Now I'm getting deluged by follow requests from people I only partially know, or by yet another marketing expert (I definitely don't have the fortitude to follow Scoble), and I'm wondering why we aren't just following each others blogs, like we did in the early days, a decade ago.

I think the differences between Twitter and personal RSS feeds are ease of setup, and Twitter managing the out-of-band by telling me who's following me (and putting enough load on that process that the spamming isn't (yet) completely out of control). Seems like this might be an application for introductions of some sort, maybe via the stuff Brian Warner has pursued in PETmail.

I also think that since "unfollowing" sends a message we sometimes don't want to, that the various Twitter apps are going to do a better job of filtering, and there'll just be a whole lot of stuff that gets ignored.

Bobsh · 8 months ago

Doesn't it seem like a tweet is basically the same thing as a synapse firing in the brain? As far as the infrastructure, at some level of abstraction, at least. I suppose the signal content is different. Anyway, so maybe looking at the brain's infrastructure would be enlightening. (If this is totally obvious already, and I just missed the memo, apologies).

(Someone else mentions synapses in these comments, too. Cool :-)

Malcolm Bastien · 8 months ago

Yes sir. Before reading this I was just subtly annoyed that Twitter was becoming so popular and the open solutions were lagging behind in long-term strategies I could get behind. Now I'm terrified.

I do still have to read up on Control Yourself's plans, but somehow I just can't see the time where I'll think to my self "Ok Awesome. It's ready, I'll never have to use Twitter again and now I'll be using a better, more free service that I can count on for the long term" (Like I do when I use Ubuntu).

In my opinion, the sooner we change from "Twitter" to "Micro-blogging" and from a "Service" that I sign up on to "Tool" I download and run individually - the better.

dave · 8 months ago

I feel the same way -- but I don't go for "microblogging" -- that's not what
this is.

I think Om Malik did a pretty good job of explaining what's going on today
in three parts:

http://tr.im/ie3d

The real-time part of all this is much more important than anything else.

Imho, ymmv, ianal.

Andy C · 8 months ago

I think they have the wrong idea about who their potential users are and what they want, and what to expect from them

I think you have the wrong idea about Laconica. Completely.