Pixelmatrix Design

Today at Beer and Blog we discussed the possibilities of distributed “micro-blogging” services using an open standard, and blogging platforms. It’s certainly an interesting idea, and I would love to see it come to fruition, but I still have several doubts about it. There are several key components that may seem small overall, but they are the little nuances that make Twitter our favorite online service.

Big Fat Issue: No Community

Twitter has grown as large as it is because of the community behind it. The public profiles provide a way to see who people are, and who else they follow. This is a fundamental way that many people discover similar users on Twitter. You can see at a glance everything you need to know about people, without having to go anywhere. Another issue is with communicating with people across the service. With Twitter it’s beautiful and simple: Just use the “@” symbol and the user’s username, and everyone knows who you’re talking about. With no central service, there is no great way to do that unless you specify the user’s full name, which is much less convenient. There’s also no way to automatically show who you’re following because all that info is in the client application or website.

No history

The “distributed” form of Twitter would take away any sort of in depth history of a users posts. Right now pagination is gone on Twitter, and many people are really bummed about it. The method of using a feed reader removes any possibility of seeing what people were up to while you were gone on vacation, or without internet for a while. Only if you had your client going constantly to cache the data as it comes in would you have any sort of way to see history.

Barrier to entry

There is an enormous barrier to entry for something like this. A user would have to (at least for now) create a blog (or use their current blog) configure it as needed, install a plugin and then search out all their friends’ blogs to see if they are using the distributed service. Another service could provide some of the functionality that you need, but it can’t completely replace all of the missing features without becoming proprietary.

Duplicating functionality

The idea of creating a standard XML format for microblogging seems redundant to me because we already have services like XMPP that have all of the same components in place.

The other aspect of this is that it’s rewriting Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and Facebook status updates, to create the Twitter-killer.

Communicating with the blog platforms

One of the other issues is that there isn’t a great way to post microblogs from the desktop that works on all the blogging platforms. I know that some platforms (like Wordpress) have great Metaweblog API support, but not all do. I have had a hard time getting that to work on ExpressionEngine, and it even has a built in plug-in for that. To really take off there would have to be a plugin for every major blogging platform, and they would all need to be compatible.

No one wants to have to manually update from their blogging admin tool.

What’s the solution?

In my opinion, instead of looking to create our own Twitter/Pownce/Jaiku-like service that’s open, we should find ways to get Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku to all talk to each other. The idea of a protocol for this sort of communication is great, but it’s not going to take off with all the users who area already using these services unless we can get everyone involved on the same page. We need to get the companies themselves on board somehow.

In our lives today, we have a seemingly infinite amount of freedom and choice. The real killer feature would be to bring everything back together so my friends on Pownce and Jaiku can talk to me on Twitter, and those who want to set up a system with their blog could also get involved.

I am definitely proud of the guys who are behind this movement, and I think it’s great that they are exploring it, but let’s see if we can get around these problems! I am sure there are even more issues that I’m not thinking of as well. Feel free to discuss in the comments below.