There are some Twitter alternatives coming that use Google's App Engine - Louis Gray
agreed with the post as it applies to Twitter but maybe I am hung up on the multipurpose use of the term "microblogging". Are tumblr and posterus microblogs? FriendFeed? Are the architectures for those "wrong"? - Robert Seidman
It seems that the most difficult part about these new messaging services is that the architecture has to accommodate the ability to slice and dice the messages to create a unique stream based on friends. - Caleb Elston
"TweetDeck offers four major columns in which to organize Twitter data: "All Tweets", essentially your friends' timeline, "Replies", showing replies to you, the equivalent of Twitter's replies tab, "Search", which will keep a running search window open for a term you've selected, and "Group", which lets you make a sub-set of those you follow on Twitter, and make a miniature timeline" [This seems like a hardcore Twitter tool. Lots of windows and activity. Seems to occupy an entire screen.] - Bwana McCall via Bookmarklet
"The recent strain at Twitter has resulted in the service reducing the number of API calls developers can make to get Twitter updates, and there, TweetDeck has you covered as well, so you learn if there's any slowness, where to lay the blame" [This alone has reduced my faith in Twitter apps to zero. The apps can only be as good as Twitter's API. It's current state is ridiculous. ] - Bwana McCall
"While Jesse Stay and others have said Twitter's major issues have decimated the developer community's efforts around Twitter, there are still some looking to innovate, TweetDeck being a good example" [I hope for their sake that Twitter gets their act together. I would hate to see such an effort go to waste.] - Bwana McCall
None of it will be wasted effort. Because a smart developer will see the larger vision of microblogging incl things like FF and identi.ca - Tris Hussey via twhirl
Bwana, I still think there will be innovation, I just know a lot of frustrated developers and it can't last long if it's taking time and effort. I was simply sharing some real life examples of developers leaving the platform because of this. Truthfully, I'm actually developing my own Twitter apps on the side - you better believe that the non-Twitter systems are on the back of my mind, and will be a backup though. I could pull away from Twitter at any time, and I'm sure they could as well. - Jesse Stay
Of course it is :) I'm only getting female replies. Naah ... must be me ... - Charlie Anzman
Been using this a few minutes now - I like it a lot. I'm one of those people who subscribes to hundreds and hundreds of tweets -- more than I can possibly keep up with. I had a special, sooperseekrit account for following RL friends and other accounts for whom I didn't want to miss a tweet. This is a more elegant solution. - Mitch Wagner
More to the point - identi.ca: another FriendFeed plugin. - Spinn
@scoble: Louis Gray's twins' can't walk, talk or use a computer (yet). Identi.ca is similarly young so please give a new product a chance. OpenSource and the federated architecture makes identi.ca very interesting. - Andy C
Andy... that's all true. But Matthew is working for CenterNetworks already (barring his getting two more write-ups after going AWOL today) - Louis Gray
Don't hold back, Matt. Tell us how you really feel. - Spinn
It's too soon to tell. Right now it's just a distraction. - brian junyor
I got an account just to check it out. Right now, I'm not impressed until things are a bit less messy and, it integrates with a lot of other services (like Friend Feed). Twitter has "something" despite their issues. They've got things cornered right now. - Candace Holly
I couldn't even register the account on the machine at work and haven't been back since - LPH
distraction at best. needs more functionality (search in particular) - Cee Bee
Robert, it 'sucks,' but it still managed to get covered by a host of bloggers ... so they either have good PR or everybody's that desperate for a twitter killer. - David Adewumi
distraction, although seems to be as non-functional as twitter (at least with my first attempts. :( - thecolor
I wonder how many people who think it sucks are Windows/OS X users. Sounds snarky, but it's not. My point is this: In the commercial world, you release a product when (you think) it's completed; in the FOSS world, you release it early so that the community can contribute feedback, bug reports, rfe's, and code. Identi.ca is presumably doing the latter. - Joanmarie
socbut.com has search, replies are coming, we have tagging ... what more can u ask : - Jay Martinez
why be so harsh about a service that was released what, 36 hours ago? Let's see where they go with identi.ca I am optimistic. - ron k jeffries
it sucks, yet I know of at least a half-dozen instances of the software have been installed elsewhere. and they're starting to talk to each other. - l.m.orchard via twhirl
Sure. Robert it is starting. You know the ideas, implementation and OPEN specs behind it: xmpp OOB, oAuth, openmicroblogging new spec for federating and uses XRDS-Simple, OpenID... It will evolve, it is Open Source... so it should get bigger. And I agree @Joanmarie it is about sharing feedback, reporting bugs, etc... - Gustavo Munoz via twhirl
If you have bugs or features you want to be included use http://laconi.ca/PITS/HomePage that is the way to help open systems to evolve... or you can pick one of them and try to solve it, post your fix and ask for being a committer ... regular open source stuff - Gustavo Munoz via twhirl
I would say blogging, because I count micro-blogging as just a subset of blogging. Meaning...I have really made no choice at all. I still get to do both :) - Rahsheen Porter
Does FF participation count as micro-blogging? I participate in FF a lot more than my blog now. More convenient, easier to start a conversation and keep it going. No self-imposed timetable or post quota to keep up with to make sure enough people are interested in being part of my "audience" (it's built in with FF). Easier to interact with people and get more interaction back. Easier to find the answers to my questions. FF does all I really wanted out of blogging anyway. - Lindsay Donaghe
depends on my mood and what I want to say. it obv takes a lot less cognitive ability to microblog, but many more mainstream people read my blog. - Philip Ryan Johnson
@Lindsay Yeah I definitely agree. FF takes away a lot of my time that I would spend doing other things, that's why I've significantly cut my usage over the past couple weeks. - Shey
definitely would stay with blogging. I can live without things like Twitter. - Rob Diana
If had known micro-blogging / lifestreaming would reach this level, I probably wouldn't blog at all - Charlie Anzman
I can always find time to micro-blog... - Rachel Beer
Micro blogging == FF? If FF posts supported more length, formatting and inclusion of media then blogging would disappear for most people - Brian Sullivan
I don't think we have to or need to choose. Both are great for different things. - Tris Hussey via twhirl
more and more I am falling towards the micro blogging side. I sometimes think I should just get rid of my traditional blog. - (jeff)isageek
Since you did not mention IM, blogging, even though I do little of it, there are times a long public rant is needed for the psyche - Michael W. May via twhirl
Mini-blogging. Creating content while wearing a mini-skirt. - Andy C
98% of my blog's readers do not know what twitter is and they don't care. When I used twitter tools to publish an daily digest of my tweets, they hated it. So: The answer is Blogging. - Rick Powell
I agree with Lindsay. Post directly to FF. - Russellreno
Now, now, Jeff. I mentioned in the article that I typically prefer native apps or Web apps to AIR apps, but this one is very interesting, at least to me. I dig it. - Louis Gray
im just trying to be funny...hehe good post btw. - (jeff)isageek
Wow, twhirlscope down -- gotta try this out - Shey
ah! and I was wondering why my twitter vanity search hit on that topic as I do not like the air apps. but grouping actually would be a reason to try it out. problem: as long as twitter decimates the request rates it is unreliable, but a first step in the right direction. will download it now ;) - Nicole Simon
Louis, I think you're right - there is still innovation happening around Twitter, fortunately. The fact is there is still a huge audience on Twitter and that audience still has the potential to be monetized. I'm even building something around Twitter at the moment. There is still that threat though, that developers could leave if Twitter keeps neglecting them - it's in the back of the mind - Jesse Stay
"feels" like Twhirl. Wish it had FF support...if it does it wasn't obvious from the website. I agree with others that I'd really like to see these Adobe air apps with some better skins - Rob Neville via twhirl
It's not exactly a very liberal/free-speechy kind of nation is it? - Adam Turetzky
This more than anything I can think of makes me glad I'm American today. - Sprague D
That country's government sucks. The country itself and (most of) its people are awesome though. - Bjorn Tipling
Sunny-side up: At least they're debating it. :-) - Louis Gray
@Sprague D there are plenty of other countries that don't even have the death penalty for anything - America is only slightly up the scale you know - Ivan Pope via twhirl
It won't be long before Ahmadinejad installs his horse in the Parliament - Peter Simard
I feel sorry for the Iranian people who have to deal with these idiots - Shey
this is just part of a "good cop, bad cop" game. they'll defeat the bill and then everyone will go "Yay! now bloggers only get torture and years in prison for being snarky about the government! Iran is teh progressive democracy!" - Karim
Peter, your comment illicited a surprise snort out of me. I never snort. Good show! - Akiva Moskovitz
Need a shirt now that says, "Give me Blogging, or give me death!" - proud to be an American! - Jesse Stay
@Ivan Pope - nice reply - people in glass houses shouldn't throw rocks and all that
@Peter Simard - I think you'll find Nero (he of the horse for senator fame) was higher on the dodgy ranking than the Iranian Government or Ahmadinejad himself
@Jonnyc - spoken like a true Xenophobe - is it timely to mention the debacles that have been performed in the name of other religions - witness the crusades anyone
That said - this isn't what Islam is about - another case of zealots manipulating a religious message for their own purposes...... - Ben Kepes via FriendFeed MT Plugin
The only disappointing thing about these is that they're not available for delivery. If I want some, I should be able to call a number and have them delivered directly to my couch. - Louis Gray
That seems to hover somewhere between incredibly wonderful and incredibly nasty. - Trish Robinson
I just came up with a name for these: the Devil's Breakfast - Rubin
Louis, i'm not sure how well the donut buns will hold up after sitting in a bag for 30 minutes and saturating with hamburger grease. But like you, I wish I could find out! - Robert Seidman
I can eat whatever I want on fridays since I eat healthy the other 6 days. I'll eat these! - Bjorn Tipling
Does it come in a veggie burger alternative? - Tom Landini
This sounds like something that would happen in my neighborhood. - Michelle Martinez
I'd also like to note the spontaneous eruption next door of what I believe is termed "karaoke fever". There is a very loud and, I might add, very crappy drum track over which some drunk dude is wailing "Love you" rather persistently. - Cyvros/fyc
Sounds like an "unauthorised taking of a vehicle" to me ;-) Either that, or the icecream man topped himself. Come on, someone had to say it...! - Matt Harwood
I am going with a very drunk ice cream truck thief who thinks he is in a under cover police vehicle and has the “siren” turned on - Earl E Morningwood
@Earl: That explains everything! But... what about the drunk karaoke guy? *strokes chin* - Cyvros/fyc
Even the Japanese have been unable to solve the age old riddle of Drunken Karaoke! They finally after years of research just embraced it as their national past time ;) - Earl E Morningwood
So the time elapsed between the first note and his first comment was 15 minutes. So Robert, did you gulp it down and ask her to do dishes? Were paper plates involved? :-) - Louis Gray
He never said he wasn't using his iPhone under the table. - Andrew Feinberg
Sounds like our dinner conversations - my wife has to pry the iphone away from me during dinner - Jesse Stay
Louis, this is one of two you know of coming soon, right? If you're there and interacting with the devs - word of advice - tell them to just go ahead set aside Scobleizer and avoid all that that involves. - Vince DeGeorge
Kwippy's feature list looks like FriendFeed applied to Twitter. - possible248
I'm releasing one soon. without any code. free. opensource. :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
Nope. Still not going to work. Not much difference between them and Twitter other than switching Python/Django for Ruby. Next? - Cyndy
directeur, is it going to be on Google App Engine? - Dewald Pretorius
I predict Q3 will see 3-6 more clones. The next 2 will get a 5-10K user test drive like indentica is getting. The rest won't. Twitter stability will increase, XMPP and track will come back online. Google will launch Jaiku 2.0 or fold enough features into gtalk to make it a reasonable substitute. Twitter/Google will battle while the remaining effort congeals into an XMPP OSS architecture/ref imp. FF will learn to group by URL rather than tagger, improve their comment sys, and become the common dashboard. - Ken Sheppardson
This isn't one I was thinking of, but I hear you, Vince. - Louis Gray
Grouping by URL is THE implimentation change I'd love to see. All referents to a given URL should be in one place, filtered by who I subscribe to and what I like. As is ... there's dupe data everywhere. - Alexander Williams via NoiseRiver
Dewald: Not necesserly. It'll be really distributed. free. standard and open :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
I'm willing to bet money that they use a relational database for this. Nobody seems to learn from Twitter's mistakes. (Of course I have no proof) - Eric Florenzano
Here we go. The open source, build a better bridge game. I'm going to keep tally and see if the number of Twitter clones matches the number of Linux distributions. - Bwana McCall
Eric: Kwippy says at Dewald's link "MySQL - a really fast database that can scale, all of us have experience with it hence the default choice." Uh.... yeah... good luck with that. - Ken Sheppardson
Ken, I really like your prediction. Won't be surprised if it turns out to be spot on. - Dewald Pretorius
If they all support the OpenMicroBlogging specification (not that I'm sure that's great, but it's standard) then it's great if there are more open source Twitter clones. - Michael C. Harris
There will be many standards to emerge and none of them will be compatible with each other. When it comes to open sourced projects, I'm a giant pessimist :) - Bwana McCall
Bwana: You're pessimistic about open standards or open source? - Eric Florenzano
directeur, don't waste your time with a Twitter clone. You've got a winner with NoiseRiver. It's scalable, being on G Apps. Ferret out every single requested FriendFeed feature, and build it into NoiseRiver. You won't regret it. - Dewald Pretorius
Dewald: Oh thanks! :) No, Actually what I'm talking about is more a philosophy than a technology. It won't take me more than a week to implement, I humbly think :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
Michael, with OpenMicroBlogging your scalability is not only dependent on your own infrastructure and architecture, but also on the latency of the web connections between your site and other nodes, as well as the infrastructure of those other nodes. - Dewald Pretorius
+1 Dewald. It's like you have one operating system with SLOW (I say SLOWWW) IO operations - directeur via NoiseRiver
Dewald: Totally disagree. Your scalability has nothing to do with the latency of your connection with other OMB-conformant feeds. Maybe your performance, but not your scalability. Anyway, you could say the same thing about RSS, but Google Reader et all do just fine. - Eric Florenzano
Bwana, open source in itself offers no reason to be pessimistic. We're probably talking here on a Linux server. :-) - Dewald Pretorius
Eric, I hear what you say, but if your performance suffers due to too many concurrent slow connections, isn't that a scalability issue? - Dewald Pretorius
Dewald: I see what you're saying too, but IMHO you'll only have a scalability problem if you design your architecture poorly. With any of these types of services, you must rely on asynchronous processes to do the polling. So actually, you shouldn't even have performance problems, just maybe staleness issues, which is pretty orthogonal to scalability. - Eric Florenzano
I like the disclosure of their scaling plans.. But what's with all these clones? They need to bring something extra and different to the table.. - Winston Teo
Eric, the primary scalability challenge with micro-blogging lies in accurately and freshly composing a user's subscribed stream. Unless one does predictive polling (at the risk of redundant bandwidth consumption), I don't see how one can get away from synchronous polling of remote servers. - Dewald Pretorius
well at least they would have the verb "so and so just kwipped something of interest" - even sight unseen I'd be interested in seeing this one in action - Steven Hodson
Dewald: Do you think that FriendFeed goes and checks all of my friends' services synchronously every time I visit the front page? No way. They've got asynchronous processes (probably distributed among many different nodes) which aggregate all of the relevant information and stores it in their own systems and data storage clusters. This is the same technique that the federated microblogging services could use--and my argument is that this type of system isn't inherently unscalable. - Eric Florenzano
Is it time to create some sort of microblogging technology room to consolidate all these convos? Here? Google group? - Ken Sheppardson
Eric, you're right. The only scalable federated microblogging architecture would be an XMPP PubSub per-user-feed model, with full local replication of the remote "tweets", plus local memcached implementation, so that presenting a user's feed consists only of reading from the cache when the user refreshes their page. - Dewald Pretorius
OK, who's going to set up the repository? Git? Subversion? - Ken Sheppardson
What if you just use flat file logging for each user+friends feed? You could push items out via SMS and whatnot, but whenver someone requested RSS, Atom, or a web view you wouldn't need to hit a DB, you could just read straight from the filesystem? - Ken Sheppardson
Ken: Totally, I'd do a folder for each user, and a subfolder each for their archives and replies. Then, getting their friends tweets is as simple as globbing the directory by date modified. Alternatively to that whole scheme, I actually think CouchDB could fit the bill extremely well too. But Dewald's suggestion of memcached could sit even between that layer, providing an even better performance win. - Eric Florenzano
@scobleizer, and what about all the people that don't subscribe to you and yet a friend "likes" or comments? Add another 10k sheep-readers to your ff tally... - Czar Derek Peterman
Jes: funny you should say that when you have a private feed - Kevin LeCureux
FriendFeed, IMO, is much more viral than Twitter - the way posts go back to the top of your friend feed every time there is activity is powerful. - Jesse Stay
My FriendFeed audience is 2x my Twitter audience. That's due to being early on FF and late on Twitter, and being more engaged here. But it took Robert, Rubel, etc. just about no time to pass me up. - Louis Gray
More viral but can be distracting. Any way to stop that for a post that I don't want to follow any more? - Dennis E. Hamilton via twhirl
It's nice to see good architecture at work, FF loads so much more information of different types with more complex relationships and yet do it so much faster than Twitter. - Amit Morson
Because people listen to you and follow your lead. I definitely have. I'm a PR academic. But will FF last before the next big thing comes around? My thesis depends on sustainability of both Twitter and FF...or the next lifestreaming aggregator that does it RIGHT. So far, FF has the lead. But do my friends, colleagues, or fellow students know or understand it? No. They get AllTop (or similar, whatever can can appeal to the masses) because it's easy... - Philip Ryan Johnson
Philip: I think FF will survive because of the search engine here. That's the magic, but it's hard to access the magic so far. - Robert Scoble
I have just 34 people are subscribed to myself but more than several people add me to their follow list during every week. - Daniel Schildt
Robert- tis true, tis true. But I walk around the hallways at Newhouse (Syr U) and nobody has even caught onto Twitter yet. It's frightening. Mass comm schools are graduating students who haven't a clue. So how do we get students to pay attention so they'll be better job candidates? It's scary, but even blogging is foreign to students. Huge disconnect. Anyway, prob a discussion for elsewhere. See Edelman's recent summit for proof of concept that the kids are more clueless than we think. Much more... - Philip Ryan Johnson
I've just started using FriendFeed and integrating it with my blog. Very nice way to pull several things together into one... - Richard Miles
Funny people still seem to be posting primarily through Twitter instead of the Share Something in FF... - simonpure
@simonpure the reason why FF users even uber-geek Scoble - still post to Twitter could be that they dont want to lose or affront their early followers. here's one way how to omit the problem: http://consiliera.tumblr.com/p... - Gaby Benkwitz
@Robert: As you know, survival is not only about user adaption or appealing to the masses, it's about monetizing that crowd, and I don't see FF don't any better job at it than Twitter. - Amit Morson
@Robert, but are they the same people as on Twitter? - aggregators have a 2nd or 3rd mover advantage. They can follow in the slipstream rather than have to create the bow wave. - Craig Thomler
Can you imaging 15K followers commenting on each of your posts? - Alex Sauceda via fftogo
Thats partly because, friendfeed is more reliable then twitter - and because, twitter created the market people are becoming aware of it and joining other alternatives too =] - Nicholas James
I would not have a fail whale. Maybe a sexy blonde who would say "I'm sorry." - Robert Scoble
I would get Louis Gray to either love it or hate it. - Robert Scoble
I would (will) make it so simple, obvious, really distributed that you'll hate yourself for not being the first to have that idea! :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
get a few politicians, a few business leaders, a few fashion leaders, sports stars, etc - create a net of interest... - james svenson
I would get Dennis Howlett to proclaim that there's no way that Enterprises would use it. - Robert Scoble
I would make sure it was designed to stay up and running even as it became increasingly popular. - Abby Martin
I would use Microsoft strategy of "embrace and extend." I would make sure it worked exactly like Twitter with one difference: all the features would work. - Robert Scoble
I would make a deal with MySpace to hold secret concerts for people who were on it. - Robert Scoble
I would make sure Facebook blocked it. - Robert Scoble
I would make it a message bus instead of CMS - Fred Grott
Robert, you're clearly having fun. What if I wrote about a company that's already introducing a way to make money off a Twitter-like service by charging to receive messages? - Louis Gray
We could do much better than clone, though. The thing is - they're THERE - no one uses them. Use your superpowers and have Google open up Jaiku and pay people to join! It has the IM feature you adore, right? - Vince DeGeorge
Louis: that sounds like a porn service. - Robert Scoble
I would have to seriously question my own sanity. - Ken Sheppardson
I would focus on two-way data sync with all existing services (oh, yeah, and hire my platform architects and operations team very, very carefully) - John McCrea
I would hire John's team away from Comcast. :-) - Robert Scoble
When Google (finally) unleashes Jaiku Next Gen running on AppEngine, this space will get REALLY interesting. - ron k jeffries
I wouldn't. Too many things like Twitter are out there already. It's time for someone to develop something even better so we can all be addicted to that. - Candace Holly
I would seed the service with 100 valuable users - politicians, entertainers, scientists, or whoever else. Content really is King - build the content and the user base will come. - JMaultasch
Louis: seriously, pay to receive messages? So you can send as many messages as you want for free, but you gotta pay to receive them? That sounds very lame. - Robert Scoble
Andru: cloning might be unoriginal but it often is profitable.Especially if you add some killer new things that the original doesn't have. - Robert Scoble
I would make it work only on iPhone and Android. - Robert Scoble
I would make it location & device aware / sensitive. - Dean Terry
I would only allow fictional characters to join, such as Batman or Darth Vader. And maybe Chuck Norris. - Mack D. Male
I would charge a reasonable monthly fee if you follow more than 500 people. - Mike Doeff
I would match it feature-for-feature with Twitter, clone the UI shamelessly, allow users to import their Twitter messages, and use a flatfile or CouchDB-based storage infrastructure (not SQL-based). - Eric Florenzano
@Robert, I'll write about it soon, and you'll see why this company thinks they're on to something. - Louis Gray
why would you want to clone Twitter? Clone is the WRONG word. Twitter competitor, different kettle of fish. Now that's something I could heart - Duncan Riley
I'd learn from Twitter's mistakes and hire a community evangelist *early* on. Make sure that I didn't plan service outages for peak usage times, make it simple, but make sure that @replies were easily trackable, that blocking was fully functional, that we had more servers and bandwidth than we needed right off that bat and scaled ahead of the need. Oh sheesh, I could go on... - Lucretia Pruitt
I wouldn't bother. It's a niche to begin with, and either Twitter will manage to rebuild and revive itself, or "the conversation" will move to FriendFeed, Facebook, or other place that already has a massive user base. - Jeremy Toeman
If I were to do a micro-blogging / status update service like twitter I would demand that it connected to mobile phones through SMS. That one feature takes twitter from micro blog to mobile social network - and also provides the engine for IM. - Tony
I would poll the @twitter user base and add as much of what they suggest as possible ;) - highcenter via twhirl
I would hire hackers to make Twitter go down...and stay down...and by hackers I mean 8 year olds with calculators. - Mark Krynsky
@Robert, @Louis, I know a company that's doing a Twitter clone that has an even better business model, and already making money off it (and they aren't doing pay-per-tweet - hint, it's a b2b model). They don't want me writing about them yet because they're applying for the TechCrunch 50 but expect to hear about them soon. - Jesse Stay
Now, back to the fun - I would have a kettle with frying fish for my error message. (thanks for the inspiration @duncan) - Jesse Stay
“Ok FriendFeed, release direct messaging in the next couple of hours and put the nail in the coffin. I can live with both services, but I'm heavily biased to FriendFeed.”
Louis, you've got to put that toe in the water and say the water is fine, let's jump on in - when not everyone jumps in you say, "Meh, screw swimming." - Vince DeGeorge
Definitely Vince. That'd be the piece-de-resistance. Free beer is always a good one too. - Mark Forman
identi.ca has thousands more users than last week, laconica has at least some developers interested, some patches submitted, and several other instances installed. I'd like to see a second wave, maybe in a month's time. - Michael C. Harris
Sure, Michael - I think it certainly has potential and a significant portion just went to reserve their name for the future (except for slow-draw Scoble, who is trying to get back his name as we speak). The main problem is getting people to MOVE. Right now, FriendFeed has the buzz and really the best chance to be the complete replacement (though it's so different). Honestly, I don't have TIME for multiple services, so consolidation would be nice for me, personally. - Vince DeGeorge
On vacation so just saw the indent.ca chatter recently - couldn't even get it to create an account for me so either someone already took my twitter/friendfeed name or it just wouldn't work - either way "meh" came a lot quicker for me - Marco
I'm about to release an idea built with almost nothing (and I mean NOTHING) to replace twitter. You won't believe how obvious this is :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
Michael: and the worst is that I'm really serious :) - directeur via NoiseRiver
Oh god please don't. E-mail! Why keep reinventing the same thing over and over again!? E-mail is a distributed, scalable system with and open standard: everything that these social networks will eventually become. - Eric Florenzano
Directeur is secretly assembling a Twitter-like made of ... a wiki. On a wristwatch. ;) - Alexander Williams via NoiseRiver
Eric, how about "open" email? Everyone get an @ address, but you set permissions? Big inboxes, with the subject being the post and the body being the discussion? - Vince DeGeorge
+ 1 yes. Would also like to see a short message service as a seperate tab option. That would be the final nail. Ppl like short messaging, they holdouts will flock to FF if its on offer. - Duncan Riley
Vince: That's really interesting. Are you proposing a social network piggybacked on the existing e-mail infrastructure? Interesting. You'd need to find a way to make sure that messages didn't "leak" into unwilling participants' inboxes. But...I think I like it! - Eric Florenzano
Eric - yes, behind the scenes distributions lists and BCC type behavior - it could be done - some kind of massive Exchange server deal. There are people smarter than me who could poo poo quickly, I'm sure - but it seems viable. - Vince DeGeorge
Twitter+FriendFeed - great allyance. But Twitter needs help - Igor Poltavskiy
