Alcides Fonseca

So Twitter is the internet application of the moment. The so called IRC of the web 2.0 has got the internet junkies Geeks 2.0 and also coming to regular people’s life.

There is an enourmous discussion on whether Twitter is useful or not. Some turn it off to get work done, others delete their account because it’s killing their blogging to then go back and realize they can’t live without it.

Now 37 signals, the company behind Backpack (and some others) and also Ruby on Rails is getting their Twitter-clone applied to entrepises ready. They’re naming it In/Out and they’ve been using it internally for the last year. Why do I call it a twitter clone? Because it allows you to update your status on What are you doing so your workmates know at any time what is keeping you busy. I love their idea of charging companies for such an idea!

My last post on microblogging mentioned Tumblelogs and that a lot of people are starting to use them instead of traditional blogs because they can share more types of content in a easier way.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, my friends, but I won’t be subscribing your tumblelogs. I subscribe a lot of stuff and I just don’t have the time to go through all the junk stuff you log. I do believe they might be useful for you, but I don’t see other people following yours. Ok, unless they have too much free time!

I value traditional blogs a lot since I get a lot of content from it, specially opinions and cool links. That’s right, if I want to highlight some link or picture or video or any other thing that really matters to me, I blog it and that’s it. If you don’t want to give you the trouble for that: a) Install Flock, makes blogging everything much easier and please do write something about it, or else it will be a tumblelog running on a blog. b) del.icio.us it tagged as “for:alcidesfonseca”.

Oh, and when writing this, I found out that Veronica Belmont has the exact same opinion on this!

I’ve already posted a bit on this matter, but web2.0 isn’t static and things evolve. Here’s how I see the scene now:

• Twitter: THE microblogging
• Jaiku: personal aggregator
• Pownce: twitter with steroids
• Tumblr: miniblogging

But things are changing! Starting by Twitter, it has stalled in my opinion, in their basic concept: only microblogging. When all other services are getting into images, videos, links, musics, quotes, you name it, Twitter spend their efforts in stabling their service (and at TwitterNotes we still get a lot of errors from Twitter!).

Jaiku has recently been acquired by Google and I guess it will have to do with the rumored gPhone! If so, Jaiku’s success will be proportional to gPhone’s.

Pownce hasn’t released the API yet, but they’re still working on new features. I guess if they had better applications (I don’t use the AIR one because it doesn’t minimize to tray!) it would be a nice service to use within small teams.

Tumblr seems to be reaching version 2.0. More features AND dead-simple go pretty good together.

A few days ago, Tiago introduced me Soup.io, another microblogging service that joins all of the others together. It seemed to me that it doesn’t bring anything new, but looked nice and it’s a nice way of having everything together. A Scrapbook as they say.

Moments ago, I was discussing with Armando about what platform would be “the chosen one” or at least how would this ones evolve. He believes that Tumblr will be the more used within sometime, but I have my doubts. Everyone (Ok, geeks and web2.0 people) is already using Twitter, have their profiles and network there. It will be hard to change everyone to a new service if the difference is not notorious, and at this is moment I don’t believe it is.

We also discussed whether it would be nice for Twitter to do trackbacks to blog posts since nowadays more and more people are using twitter to comment blogs. I usually only link it, I comment there is it is small or if I can make a nice big post out of that, I’d blog about it. But what about miniblogging (as I call tumblr and soup.io), they might deserve a trackback… What do you think?

Microblogging is becoming more and more used by people in this new Social Web. Twitter arrived and made millions of fans. It was such a success they had problems escalating. Taking advantage of that downtimes, Jaiku got many users to switch over to them, giving them more features. IMO, jaiku is my personal aggregator, not a microblogging service. I sticked to twitter, but had its feed in my jaiku webpage. Only if the feed was updated more frequently…

Some time ago Kevin Rose, the kid from Digg, and his team (including my dream girl) came up with this microblogging system with Messages, Files, Links and Events that I find very interesting. Only one disadvantage: It only works from the web or the AIR app that cannot be minimized to tray. Thankfully they are getting a public API avaiable soon. In the meanwhile, some guys managed to hack the API used by the desktop app and made a python module.

Well, using this and Python-Twitter, I made a small script that updates both your Twitter and Pownce status at the same time. And a plus: if you enter a url in the message, it will add it as a link in Pownce ;)

Give it a try and comment with feedback please. If it has some success, I’ll probably do some graphical interface, a jabber/msn bot and in the future add the combined list from both your Twitter and Pownce friends.