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Scripting News
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Dave Winer's weblog, started in April 1997, bootstrapped the blogging revolution.
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Feature suggestion for Twitter
 "Like" Is a FriendFeed feature that Twitter should have. It's a misnomer, it's not about liking something. When you like something that means you recommend it. Everyone who follows you gets the recommendation.
How it would work in Twitter.
1. You're reading something I wrote in Twitter.
2. You say you "like" it -- which is like adding it to your Favorites (same UI).
3. It goes on your output stream. All the people who follow you see it too.
People are doing this manually now -- "retweeting" -- but this is one click and the system remembers where it came from. If it were possible to hang stuff off a tweet (as it is in FF) then there would only be one place.
Twitter should have this. It's a very important feature.
PS: From now on when I say something should be in Twitter, it should also be in all Twitter clones, for now that's identi.ca.
PPS: I'm sure Twitter-only people are sick of hearing it, but FF has mystical qualities that I'm not sure anyone fully appreciates. It reveals little bits of itself to you slowly over time. Not sure it's always the best way, but it's like a puzzle, a story that you want to know how it will turn out. You can't get it from a quick look, you have to immerse yourself in it. Not saying everyone should, but I'm glad I did. 
PPPS: I'm started to develop systems on top of FriendFeed that I initially thought I would develop on Twitter. Their reliability and performance make it thinkable, where Twitter has become flaky, not only technically, but also in the way it deals with developers. Could happen with FF too, but then my fallback is identi.ca, where worse comes to worse, I could operate my own net.
PPPPS: I am however using identi.ca for something I thought I would use Twitter for. As a lightweight identity system. For the project I'm working on, I'm requiring users to have an identi.ca login. This little thing has huge implications in the identity space. A lightweight low-security login that's accessible via API, it's something I've been asking Google and Yahoo to do for ages. They can't seem to wrap their minds around it. Along comes identi.ca and boom, problem solved.
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Mini-blog posts
I never agreed that Twitter is what some people call a micro-blogging service. Just didn't feel much like blogging to me. But FriendFeed is another story. I am using it more like a blogging tool than Twitter. For example...
1. Yesterday I snuck out to see the new Batman movie on its opening day. I wrote my first review on FF. In the morning (now) I have more thoughts. If Heath Ledger hadn't died, and if there were two other big performances like his, it might have been on the same level as The Departed, and that's high praise. The other characters and the actors who portrayed them weren't anywhere near as interesting as Ledger's Joker, who unlike Nicholson's or Romero's -- wasn't funny, at least not in the normal way. He is a pathetic character, wonderfully pathetic. Really something to see. So my first impression last night was pretty lukewarm, but after a few hours it seems more masterful. You could have cut out most of the other scenes and made a movie just about the Joker and that would have been great. Too bad Ledger died. He was becoming a really fine actor.
2. As you may know I bought a cute little Windows laptop on impulse the other day. It was a good move. And on FF last night I asked for help networking it with my Macs. Glad i bought it. Gotta keep up on what the other guys are doing. Apple has been doing pretty well, the iPhone was risky, and they pulled it off, not easy to do. Microsoft usually takes three tries to get it right, Apple got it right the first time. But in ultra-portable laptops, Apple isn't cutting it. This little EEE PC thing is a marvel. There are some really crappy things about it, like the uncontrollable trackpad and the keypad is tiny, and squinting at the tiny screen hurts my eyes, but it really is a joy of a product. If only it ran Mac OS.
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What about blogging?
Publishing keeps getting cheaper.
 That's been the constant push, the practical application of Moore's Law in my neck of the woods. I've always been a publishing guy, and that's always been how I viewed computers, and it's why I got into them in the first place.
Most people don't get this, the real story of blogging is just the continuation of the process. You could just have easily focused on the laser printer, Aldus Pagemaker and local area networking in the 1980s, or the web browser and Netscape in the 1990s. Blogging is the leading edge in publishing in the first decade of this century.
Here's what Clay Shirky says on the subject. "Forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."
Well put, and definitely worth passing along.
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Go read Marc's post now
 Highly recommend this post by Marc Canter, it's filled with ideas. Much the same as my thinking. I have a post planned for tomorrow or Sunday that should blow out some assumptions about identity and federating these micro-blogging services. Low-tech, worse is better, re-use what's already out there, as Marc says it's all happening now, and I'm loving the way it's turning out.
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Twitter connects to Gnip
 More movement in micro-blogging!
Recall that Gnip is a ping syndicator, sort of weblogs.com on steroids. Not the simplest of APIs, but apparently quite powerful. I tried to get some code running with it, but hit a hard wall that I couldn't get past. No matter, others are successfully adapting to Gnip.
I just read this announcement on Twitter from Eric Marcoullier pointing to a TechCrunch piece. Eric says: "It's official: Twitter is pushing to Gnip and Gnip is pushing it the fuck out to everyone!" But this is kind of contradicted in the TC piece, which says you can only get updates from users you specify. You can't connect up on the same (firehose) basis that Summize was connecting before they were acquired by Twitter (earlier this week).
Like I said: So much movement. (There's more coming.)
One thing's for sure is that being open to developers is very much a competitive issue. This is why two-party systems work in technology and one-party systems stagnate. Why, when Netscape dominated browsers nothing moved, and it was fun while Microsoft and Netscape were competing, and why we returned to stagnation when Netscape folded, and why it's once again interesting now that Firefox is flourishing. Same thing in the competition betw Twitter and identi.ca.
When I talked with Evan Prodromou yesterday he said they would open up their XMPP back-end to anyone and everyone without limits. Now it's up to them to make good on that, and this shoudl give Twitter the incentive to go all the way with Gnip. BTW, Gnip should be agnostic, they should work with identi.ca as well as with Twitter.
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