Scripting News: Where is Twitter's WordPress? (Scripting News)
azizhp
· 10 months ago
actually, the Prologue Theme for Wordpress pretty much fits the bill. Anyone who runs wordpress can use it. For a great example, see Talk Islam: http://talkislam.info. Note that if you run Prologue on Wordpress MU, you can also use the Buddypress plugins and thereby get direct messaging and profile functionality too. its basically feature complete, aside from @replies (but that could be a simple plugin).
Gerrit Eicker
· 10 months ago
Exactly. I'm wondering why Prologue/WordPress didn't make it to be #3? There are alternatives out there. Simply use them. I'm micro-blogging at http://Wir-sprechen-Online.com, a WordPress.com-Prologue-blog that sends my "tweets" to Twitter, other (Laconica based) micro-blogging services, and even Facebook. Those centralized services remain as a feedback-channel. At least for a transition period...
Twitter got way more useful for me when I unfollowed a whole pile of folks and got more selective about new follows.
Now that I'm using tweekdeck and taking advantage of the groups feature twitter is much more useful. What would be nice is a clean interface for the sharing of groups (it would also make a good recommendation tool). If groups are then tagged it starts to add the context and the structure to the data that twitter so desperately needs.
Boris Anthony
· 10 months ago
Laconi.ca is Twitter's WordPress. They just needs to make it easier to theme and it'll take off like Mentos in Coke. (They're concentrating on making it easier to install with all features such as SMS posting, proper queuing etc. Keep in mind also this is not a blog. The architecture needs to be totally different. Somewhere between a CMS and a messaging service, like XMPP or such. And it still needs to be easily installable like Wordpress...)
I don't disagree, but more accurately it *could be* Twitter's WordPress. It's almost there, but almost is just almost. Dave
lmorchard
· 10 months ago
WordPress is not just free or open source - it's also relatively easy to install. Until it gets those two things, the barrier to use filter excludes nearly everyone.
Dirk Olbertz
· 10 months ago
And when you start looking to replace FriendFeed, make sure to have a look at NoseRub (http://noserub.com) :-) It also is an identi.ca client, by the way...
The AMI thing is tempting, I'm just not sure how easy it would be to store the database on that persistent storage that Amazon now provides. And all this just by fireing up the AMI. And somehow it would need to find that persistent storage if you need to re-start the AMI.
lmorchard
· 10 months ago
FWIW, I think there's a bug filed against the laconica project to get an official AMI built:
I saw your comment on identi.ca. Maybe this is something we could work on together. It has to be a totally easy install. Anything extra that I have to scratch my head over is going to kick me out of the loop (actually I mean people like me, I'm willing to endure some pain for the cause).
lmorchard
· 10 months ago
Hmm... I have been meaning to get back into hacking around with laconi.ca, but have yet to play with Amazon EC2. Might be a good hook for me to poke at both when my round tuit supply replenishes soon.
dave
· 10 months ago
What's a "round tuit supply?" Sounds fun! (Oh I get it now. Gotta say it out loud.)
am i missing something or isnt that what google is doing with jaiku & google app engine?
dave
· 10 months ago
1. Jaiku is not close enough to Twitter.
2. Appengine is not S3 or EC2. I don't know how to deploy an app there. (I could learn of course.)
vasudevram
· 10 months ago
Dave, App Engine deployment is dead easy - almost just a push of a button, really - at least for simple apps (which I've tried, not done any complicated ones yet). Also, search for and read what others have to say about this. The ease is comparable to PHP script deployment on vanilla, widely-available shared-hosting providers, where you just copy your scripts (and 3rd party libraries, if any) to your shared host, and are ready to go. Ease of deployment is one of the best things about Google App Engine, though there are other pluses too (and some issues or restrictions, of course).
- Vasudev
Jeffington
· 10 months ago
You could play around with the open source Laconica. It's written in PHP so you could probably easily have it interface with whatever you like. They use it as a kind of "private twitter" at army.twit.tv.
dave
· 10 months ago
That's pretty much exactly what I said. Did you stop reading after item #1? Or did your browser break?? :-)
beaulebens
· 10 months ago
Isn't Twitter's WordPress... WordPress? Slap the Prologue Theme (http://prologuetheme.org) on a WordPress install and you have a basic Twitter clone.
dave
· 10 months ago
Do you have one set up we can try?
azizhp
· 10 months ago
if you're interested i can easily set up a demo. drop me an email at apoonawa-blog@yahoo.com
Colin Devroe
· 9 months ago
I scrolled down through the thread here to see if someone mentioned Prologue. The major thing missing here is SMS support (if that is important to you). Also following.
banane
· 10 months ago
Refreshing to read this Dave- I'm a big fan of Twitter as a protocol, less as a brand/company.
briantroy
· 10 months ago
Dave - I get exactly what you are saying. How do you kill all the noise and just engage in the context (topic/subject/what have you) that you care about. The question I have is, why would you pull that off to the side and take it out of the "public domain". The reason I ask that question is it inhibits "discoverablity" - sure someone can join/federate using the Laconica model... but they have to discover it first. That was, is, and always be the challenge. I'm doing some things to "scope" Twitter to specific contexts - but leave the conversation in the public domain. Ultimately I think that is the solution you seek. Check out Peter Himmelman's Furious World (http://furiousworld.com) for an example.
dave
· 10 months ago
I wouldn't take the conversation out of the public domain any more than this conversation we're having right now is. But if we were having this with 18K people following -- well to be polite -- we wouldn't get very far. :-)
Tony Buser
· 10 months ago
When I think about people running their own "twitter" servers, I keep thinking about how I'd lose the power of http://search.twitter.com to do real time searching and trends. For me, that's one of the greatest things about a centralized twitter service and something I don't think can really be duplicated by regular search engines.
lmorchard
· 10 months ago
This is more of a project idea than a working feature, but Laconica does support search and offers results in OpenSearch RSS format:
Given a smart / sane architecture with caching and whatnot, there could be a search.laconica.com that pulls results from a wide range of distributed installations. Even better, in my mind, would be an aggregator in laconica that pulls from sites associated with subscriptions, thus applying a bit of a social filter to the results.
Tony Buser
· 10 months ago
Now that is interesting. I'd never heard of OpenSearch before. Even so, such an aggregator could never be as instantaneous as a centralized service like twitter... when it works... at least it would be more stable... until the aggregator overloads.
brianjesse
· 10 months ago
This is the architecture i've been working on for http://openmicroblogger.org -- my microblog software which is network-compatible with Laconi.ca and can be themed with WordPress themes. It uses a restful mvc back-end of my own design which can work with a few WordPress plug-ins as well as a lot of existing WordPress themes.
I'm using the Nutch tomcat-based search engine for testing, it exposes OpenSearch results, does anybody have any recommendations for other engines with OpenSearch built-in? I suppose Lucene has it but I haven't tried that yet.
In the config.yml for openmicroblogger is a "ping_server" option, which is where each installed microblog server will post URLs of newly created content for the search server to index.
Another interesting config.yml option is the Zeep Mobile API key, you can get one free from http://zeepmobile.com to enable 2-way SMS from your own site.
I have an Ubuntu EC2 instance i've been working on, and will post an AMI here when it's ready.
If Googlebot hit all the microblogging services constantly, then yes. Otherwise, Google indexes are hardly real time.
James
· 10 months ago
Twitter *kills* google in real-time search though....
dave
· 10 months ago
I know -- but by pointing that out we hope they can make it better. :-)
stephdau
· 10 months ago
IMHO, I'm not sure how solution #1 would make a "Twitter WordPress". Any half decent coder could do what you suggest Amazon do, so it wouldn't really be that much of an enabler. Only solution #2 (or similar) can achieve this. The main factor for which WP became so popular, even over other self-hosted blogging engines such as MT, was its ease of install and use. Solution #1 would not achieve this.
James
· 10 months ago
I'm curious what magical twitter feature or features you think could allow for this. Creating friend groups or categories?
dave
· 10 months ago
Groups would certainly make it more possible, but I really want to have complete independence and the only way I get that is with my own software running on my own server.
James
· 10 months ago
Yah... my comment was kinda missing the point. More self managed, micro blogging options are definitely a good thing no matter what. My head has been wrapped up in the real-time possibilities surrounding twitter but that mob and its potential is not going anywhere.
fredericsidler
· 10 months ago
Why would you start everything again. Twitter seems to be the most open service between the most popular http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-ter... You spent 2 years building your network on Twitter with more than 18,452 followers. Are you ready to do it again. I doubt about that. Unless Twitter dies and you lost all your posts and FOAF. First thing every user should check on new services is the way to back up its datas and social graph (if this possible). I put more than 4 years of bookmarks on delicious, but I do use Amazon S3 to back it up regulary with a cron like http://adamstiles.com/2005/08/backing_up_deli/ Nobody want to loose the time he spent on different social network. Nobody want to loose it comments. Do you give them to cocomment.com, disqus.com, etc. Even with some bookmarks, you cannot trust them as links sometimes disapear ;-( Of course a de-centralized way to store it own datas and connect them with the others would be great, but who can afford it. And every entreprise will try to get the contents and the users.
I think everyone should keep it datas and be able to distribute them (partially or totally) to an existing service or a new one if this one change his TOS or disapear. With all new services coming out, you can see for example that your existing social graph is very important. Lots of service invites you to invite your twitter friends, facebook friends (fbconnect) or gmail address book.
dave
· 10 months ago
I'm not giving up anything -- I'm going to keep building my network on Twitter.
Ralf
· 10 months ago
we help to build the federated system with bleeper.de - largest laconica site outside North America !!
Matteo Brunati
· 10 months ago
what about semantic microblogging, like smob? based or connected with talis platform.. ( semantic web store service as amazon s3, info on http://www.talis.com/platform/index.shtml ) with a nice interface, of course, and no technical details .)
Dave please have a look at www.twitblogs.com very early alpha still but built on opensolaris, mysql and zendphp. The version being built will be an opensocial container to support third party apps and also we have just implemented an internal build that supports the twitter oauth api and openid for authentication. Please try it and let us know what you think?
Bertil
· 10 months ago
I certainly agree that we need a Open Source / forkable version of Twitter — but I'm not sure the practice have settled yet, and I'd rather have the disagreements be clear to most before splitting the current efforts. In that sense, Zuckerberg public statement that we disagree on what to do with our information is interesting.
For instance, I'm positive there are more then 800 people that have interesting things to say to you — but that most of what your 50 closest friends say isn't that interesting. Twitter doesn't have an efficient rating or quality filtering system; nobody leverages (or uses) the staring system. One might use hashtags for taging, but it's not ideal. Would you agree some filtering wouldn't be too much?
If you manage to implement what you describe, please include that in the specs for v. 2.0
@anu
· 10 months ago
Why not just use twitter ? Create a new account - protect it (or don't) - follow the small group of people you want to, and you're done.
Alex Leonard
· 10 months ago
And of course, there's the possibilities of Jaiku when it open sources. Will be interesting to see where that goes.
Prologue, as mentioned by azizhp, is pretty nice too, and certainly BuddyPress looks very interesting and if it gets a little easier to install there could be a lot going for it.
"I think Facebook did the right thing by spelling out in black and white the reality of the Internet. Once you hit publish, it's gone."— well said. That's it in a nutshell.
James Hogan
· 10 months ago
I'm an undergraduate at Tipperary Institute studying Creative Multimedia at and I'm building a service called pachume for my final year project, twitter but with channels, comments, and private groups. But what I need is a @stephenfry or @wossy or @barackobama to join and give my service authority. Until the major players start to disseminate their views across multiple platforms it's going to be hard for these other services to take off. Although a company wide twitter intranet would be a great solution for any business' internal dialogue development.
bsoist
· 10 months ago
I believe you made similar comments about Digg a while back. This is a valid point. Some services are fantastic until they become over-crowded. I like following about 700 people on Twitter and I feel like I know who is who but there is a lot of echo now.
dave
· 10 months ago
There are also a lot of people on Twitter nowadays who see it as a business model, and that kind of spoils the whole thing. It's one of the reasons I stopped going to tech conferences, it stopped being about exchanging ideas and looking for things we could do together and became more like what I described at the end of the piece about making money with blogs. "I have to give you a pitch or else I can't justify being here, and the only question I have is which pitch should I give you." I can stay home for that and get that watching TV. :-)
bsoist
· 10 months ago
Well said. I see a lot of "Internet Marketers" on Twitter. I've been using the Internet for almost 20 years and I've even used it for my own financial benefit (responsibly), but I still can't wrap my head around "Internet Marketer."
Raimo van der Klein
· 10 months ago
Hi,
We recently(last week) launched Zcapes.. We aggregate conversations around objects. We let people publish their own Zcape. A mini blog for mobile concentrated around an object or event(preferably linked to the real world). The twitterbox, which is bascially a filter on keyword, is very popular.
One of the core value of twitter is that is provides a global namespace. I think that this would be the hardest part to replicate in a silo-ed, distributed model. No?
All Comments
Now that I'm using tweekdeck and taking advantage of the groups feature twitter is much more useful. What would be nice is a clean interface for the sharing of groups (it would also make a good recommendation tool). If groups are then tagged it starts to add the context and the structure to the data that twitter so desperately needs.
They just needs to make it easier to theme and it'll take off like Mentos in Coke.
(They're concentrating on making it easier to install with all features such as SMS posting, proper queuing etc. Keep in mind also this is not a blog. The architecture needs to be totally different. Somewhere between a CMS and a messaging service, like XMPP or such. And it still needs to be easily installable like Wordpress...)
Also, The Open Microblogging Protocol etc etc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging
It's almost there, but almost is just almost. Dave
The AMI thing is tempting, I'm just not sure how easy it would be to store the database on that persistent storage that Amazon now provides. And all this just by fireing up the AMI. And somehow it would need to find that persistent storage if you need to re-start the AMI.
http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1120
loud.)
2. Appengine is not S3 or EC2. I don't know how to deploy an app there. (I could learn of course.)
- Vasudev
Or did your browser break?? :-)
The reason I ask that question is it inhibits "discoverablity" - sure someone can join/federate using the Laconica model... but they have to discover it first. That was, is, and always be the challenge.
I'm doing some things to "scope" Twitter to specific contexts - but leave the conversation in the public domain. Ultimately I think that is the solution you seek. Check out Peter Himmelman's Furious World (http://furiousworld.com) for an example.
conversation we're having right now is. But if we were having this with 18K
people following -- well to be polite -- we wouldn't get very far. :-)
http://gitorious.org/projects/laconica/repos/ma...
And, as intended by the OpenSearch spec, this is intended for aggregation like so:
http://www.stress-free.co.nz/searching_across_w...
http://drupal.org/project/opensearch_aggregator
Given a smart / sane architecture with caching and whatnot, there could be a search.laconica.com that pulls results from a wide range of distributed installations. Even better, in my mind, would be an aggregator in laconica that pulls from sites associated with subscriptions, thus applying a bit of a social filter to the results.
I'm using the Nutch tomcat-based search engine for testing, it exposes OpenSearch results, does anybody have any recommendations for other engines with OpenSearch built-in? I suppose Lucene has it but I haven't tried that yet.
In the config.yml for openmicroblogger is a "ping_server" option, which is where each installed microblog server will post URLs of newly created content for the search server to index.
Another interesting config.yml option is the Zeep Mobile API key, you can get one free from http://zeepmobile.com to enable 2-way SMS from your own site.
I have an Ubuntu EC2 instance i've been working on, and will post an AMI here when it's ready.
http://open.srcphp.com/projects/38-OpenMicroBlo...
-- Brian
complete independence and the only way I get that is with my own software
running on my own server.
I think everyone should keep it datas and be able to distribute them (partially or totally) to an existing service or a new one if this one change his TOS or disapear. With all new services coming out, you can see for example that your existing social graph is very important. Lots of service invites you to invite your twitter friends, facebook friends (fbconnect) or gmail address book.
Twitter.
based or connected with talis platform.. ( semantic web store service as amazon s3, info on http://www.talis.com/platform/index.shtml )
with a nice interface, of course, and no technical details .)
some info on http://bnode.org/blog/2009/01/28/semantic-micro...
For instance, I'm positive there are more then 800 people that have interesting things to say to you — but that most of what your 50 closest friends say isn't that interesting. Twitter doesn't have an efficient rating or quality filtering system; nobody leverages (or uses) the staring system. One might use hashtags for taging, but it's not ideal. Would you agree some filtering wouldn't be too much?
If you manage to implement what you describe, please include that in the specs for v. 2.0
Prologue, as mentioned by azizhp, is pretty nice too, and certainly BuddyPress looks very interesting and if it gets a little easier to install there could be a lot going for it.
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu:8080/DQIIMAGES/largeim...
by Salvador Dali
from the book (and others) http://www.csdl.tamu.edu:8080/dqiDisplayInterfa...
That's rather an amazing project http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes/V2/CPI/index...
We recently(last week) launched Zcapes.. We aggregate conversations around objects. We let people publish their own Zcape. A mini blog for mobile concentrated around an object or event(preferably linked to the real world). The twitterbox, which is bascially a filter on keyword, is very popular.
Zcapes Builder: zcapes.com
Mobile Zcapes: m.zcapes.com