Microblogging environment

Now that I am connected to both the Twitter and the Jaiku service, I have to re-assess my usage of the tools. My main usage of these services is through the clients Twitterific and Juhu. And there starts the first problem: I just want one client. And I already have a blogging client, MarsEdit, so why add another one? And I do not want to get locked into either one.

The other aspect is the viewing of microblog items. I use Twitterific and Juhu to view the posts of myself and of my friends. I also subscribe to the RSS-feeds. In principle the RSS-feed viewer is sufficient. However from time to time I like to have a viewer, which updates itself very often. I like the Twitterific viewer here. However Twitter is not able to aggregate, whereas Jaiku has this possibility.

And then I want to look at the MicroContent itself. The structure of the MicroContent is a little bit different between the services. Both support 140 character field. Jaiku has a commenting system in place, whereas in Twitter one has to put a '@username' in the text field. Twitter can create a reply page from these encodings. Jaiku also supports the location of the user. This location is also encoded within the Jaiku RSS-feed. Integration with Plazes would be nice here.

The other interesting feature is that Jaiku can aggregate other feeds and produce a single microblog feed. I still have to play with this and see whether I like it. One can for instance show what one is currently playing within Last.fm. And with this we get into the field of status messages. Many instant messaging service support the showing of status messages. Usually the user has to type these or they can be autogenerated. I do this for instance with Skype, but MSN also supports this. And then there are statuses such as offline, available, online, etc. In Jaiku one can see one's availability on the phone. Not sure how these statuses can be generalised. But one can envisage a whole infrastructure around micro events in ones life.

An finally what is missing is the archive function. What happens when one wants to change providers? Do we really want to archive the micro events? The only solutions seems to be to do the micro blogging yourself or save the rss-feeds.

Anyway I will experiment a little in setting up my own micro blogging environment and try to follow the DataLibre idea of write once, publish everywhere.

Categories/tags: MicroContent • type • blog
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Have you tried Hictu? It’s similar to Twitter but you can also make audio and video posts there. Not bad. Try it out: http://www.hictu.com. Launched yesterday

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