"http://gritly.com Gritly shrinks a group of URLs into one bit.ly Right now the Gritly shrink machine laser beam can take up to 5 long URLs and morph them into one single, shareable bit.ly. We built and designed this over the weekend but are looking for feature suggestions and comments. We're also designing a REST API for Gritly in hopes that the grouping ability will be added to more clients and utilities."
- Bryan Woods
"With all due respect, this is a matter for Twitter, the book's publisher, and Alex himself. Nobody works 24/7 on any job (this coming from a startup-employed guy leaving a blog comment at 2:30 AM), and if he wants to take the time he's not working on Twitter to give a book to the emerging Scala community, I don't see where the gripe is. You said he's a hard worker who answers your emails quickly no matter what time. Sounds like a guy who has no problems working hard. Everybody wants Twitter to be the best it can possibly be, but what Alex does in his non-Twitter time is really none of your business or mine."
- Bryan Woods
"I've heard nothing but amazing things about Scala and have been looking forward to a book about it for a long time. If Alex can handle the workload it's a win for developers. Best of luck to him."
- Bryan Woods
"I think we, the early adopters of free software, need to get together and write up some kind of agreement that keeps us as much as possible from grinding our axes on free software services."
- Bryan Woods
"I like the various ideas going on trying to solve this problem. Particularly Zed Shaw's Utu project: http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com I think these are definitely problems that need to be solved, but Shaw's ideas of reputation and repercussion stick with me a bit more, particularly for web-wide discussions."
- Bryan Woods
identi.ca is still nothing more than a Twitter clone best I can tell. A step back from FF. Not sure why anyone would want to spend time there when we've got this.
- Thomas Hawk
Tease: And even more so in the coming months. Spoke with Evan last night and there are some interesting things on their way.
- Austin Hill
I personally think it will be interesting to see what identi.ca does to differetiate itself from twitter
- Mike Hamilton
@Thomas - Twitter clone hasn't begun to cover what's possible. I think that's like calling Wordpress a Blogger clone back in 2004. I wish the Twitter guys all the best, but there is a lot of innovation to come in Microblogging, Lifecasting and Activity stream aggregation. Twitter seems to have it's hands full scaling and I'd love to see some innovation on features in the market place. I think identi.ca will be part of that market for innovation.
- Austin Hill
Why should identi.ca differentiate itself? It's really about recognizing that federating status updates should become a "taken-for-granted" part of social infrastructure. Next step is Interop with Twitter, not differentiation.
- Chris Messina
Austin, but isn't identi.ca a step back from FriendFeed really? Why spend any time there?
- Thomas Hawk
I don't want to "like" the post, but I do want to "like" chris messina's comment :)
- karl dotter
I know what it is! David Winer has found out that identi.ca has turned into a wishing well and he's keeping it to himself. I'm going to like this so he remembers who his friends are :-)
- Jonas Anderson
"With today's addition to Identica, you can now follow people!"
- Bryan Woods
evan did say last week that a Twitter-compatible API was on track for this week. Hopefully, that's the news. And it's NOT about a twitter clone; it's about making microblogging an open standard -- like email -- that allows you to use your access method of choice (local client, web, mobile, etc.) Interoperability to microblogging will FREE it! Remember MCImail? cc:mail? Remember Profs? Remember VAX All-in-1-mail? All frontrunners in the email channel. All closed. All dead (or on life support).
- Bundini
The TwitterAPI is already available on identi.ca and in the darcs repository. maybe something else?
- Markus Heurung
@Thomas Hawk - Why do you see FriendFeed as a step forward from Twitter? FriendFeed is something different - you can't really compare the two when you look at the core use case.
- sebmos
@Thomas: as someone who never really got into twitter, I thought the same as you. However, after becoming addicted to ff, I began using twitter more as a great way to post messages to my ff (there are just so many ways to get things *in* to twitter). I'm rooting for identi.ca, though, simply because i think it will one day do all that twitter does using an open source system. That, and I have no real follower base on twitter to worry about abandoning anyway.
- Trent Olson
I also use Twitter primarily as a way of posting onto FF, with the bonus that my followers on Twitter who haven't moved across the FF (still a majority) get the message two. I'll move to identi.ca if there are people there I want to share ideas with, not because of features... well... unless they're killer!
- David Sim
"An open microblogging platform really is exactly what we need as a community. I'm never the type to bitch and moan about this kind of stuff, but I, from the bottom of my heart, don't think this platform is the beginning of our solution. Everything that people are complaining about Twitter taking down (limitations to calls on the API, tracking, search outsourced to Summize, etc) aren't even implemented here. Call me crazy, but I would hope that the rough beginnings of whatever platform we embrace for our "federated" or "decentralized" future would be something much more interesting."
- Bryan Woods
"If I'm coming off as bitchy or complaining I really don't mean to be. Maybe my only question is this: Is it better to start off with a shitty platform or with a blank slate? It might not be shitty, but we could have this kind of thing running in five minutes, so why aren't we more discriminatory on what we build from? Shouldn't we be a little choosy on the foundation of what we build?"
- Bryan Woods
"Laconica is a pretty horrible solution for all of my microblogging woes. I don't want to hack php, the only useful feature out of the box is the jabber hook, the list goes on. Really sad if this ends up being the definitive open microblogging platform imho."
- Bryan Woods
"...And why would free apps automatically have to have an ad-based business model? And since when is Google the only provider of display advertisements?"
- Bryan Woods
"Dave, thank you. Really. I've been putting off subscribing to NewsJunk because I'm frankly not that interested in politics, and of course would have to subscribe to another 500 or so feeds to balance out the flow. TechJunk is exactly what I'm looking for. I'm tired of the same blogs with the same gossip and same topics, but even with my current subscription load, the "others" don't bubble up often enough often due to smaller blogs not posting as frequently and so forth. I'm extremely excited about this. *Edit* Though this does reinvigorate my interest in a Share.opml clone..."
- Bryan Woods
"Hey Sesh. I would totally have agreed with you, except those words were said by Guido straight to me. It was a really, really strange night."
- Bryan Woods
"I used Zemanta on a few posts about two months ago and thought it was at first neat conceptually. The thing they haven't really figured out and harnessed, though, is that linking and image hosting in blogs is far more political and strategic (even on the lowest level) than their software accounts. Most bloggers I know think very carefully about where they link and what images they hotlink, so to have software make these decisions for you based on keywords seems pretty absurd to me. I'd love to see a Zemanta API that could allow for scripts that would rank suggested links in accordance to Technorati rankings or something like that, though."
- Bryan Woods
"I used Zemanta on a few posts about two months ago and thought it was at first neat conceptually. The thing they haven't really figured out and harnessed, though, is that linking and image hosting in blogs is far more political and strategic (even on the lowest level) than their software accounts. Most bloggers I know think very carefully about where they link and what images they hotlink, so to have software make these decisions for you based on keywords seems pretty absurd to me. I'd love to see a Zemanta API that could allow for scripts that would rank suggested links in accordance to Technorati rankings or something like that, though."
- Bryan Woods