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27 Jun 2007
Microblogging flow
I am still thinking about my MicroBlog-flow. I got a few steps further.
What I want to say in my microblog is something like "I am thinking (or doing) X in response to Y while hearing Z and being at L". In this sentence X is the classic tweet in Twitter or Jaiku. The Y is to express a thread of communication. In Twitter this can be another Twitter user and is encoded in a tweet as '@username'. In Twitter this can also be an URI, usually encoded as tinyURL. This URI might point to another tweet, a wev-page, a blog-item, etc. Z is a piece of music and can be the artist plus track name. This can be taken from a local audio application or a service such as Last.fm. And finally L is a location and can be a place-name plus country name. This can be taken from a service such as Plazes.
I think the above combines what we see appearing in various services. We need an extremely easy way to publish this MicroContent. It must be as easy as click-click, write and publish. The write-part in here is the classic tweet (X) and the other parts must be automatically extracted from other applications and services of the user is using.
The publication part is another matter as not all services support all four MicroContent fields. In principle it is possible to encode the four fields into a single tweet. We see this happen within Twitter. A service like Plazes only supports location and tweet. And Jaiku supports location and tweets. And within Skype one can use the tweet as mood text and also for MSN Messenger.
The publication of threading information is another matter. If one published to a specific service, one should follow the threading rules of that service. So in Twitter one should use the implicit threading. In Jaiku one should use the explicit threading of the service.
And in addition to the publishing of this MicroBlog information one could specific features of a service, such as the icons of Jaiku or publishing to specific channels or user accounts.
So not only blogging has gotten complex, microblogging is becoming complex as well. For me this implies that I should take control back by publishing this microblog content integrally in an environment that I can fully manage.