I agree that TWiT Army is not for everyone, but in a sense that is the point. The OpenMicroblogging approach allows the creation of smaller, more focused communities than such as this one, while still allowing users to connect outside that community. There are other laconica servers springing up everywhere. While many of these are really just test installations, I am sure that the idea will continue to spread and many special interest groups will find the model compelling.

Of course, the larger community approach has its attractions too and identi.ca itself aims to offer this, so it is far more of a twitter competitor than the smaller servers like TWiT Army. Twitter has a couple of years head-start on identi.ca, so it’s no surprise that the community is still more vibrant there. Personally, I will continue to use twitter myself for that reason, and I see identi.ca as a fall-back in the event that pressures from twitter’s VC backers result in the plug being pulled.

Maybe the OpenMicroBlogger community needs to do a little more promotion beside the Twit Army (sorry Sean and Brian not a Leo fan). A podcast Fanclub is not really the rest of the industry.

Sorry Gary – that is wrong. If you set up a laconi.ca server of your own, you can subscribe and see identi.ca messages. If someone else decided to build another system using the openmicroblogging protocol, you too would be able to subscribe and see laconi.ca and identi.ca messages.

Just to be clear: There is two parts to this – a protocol for services to talk, and the services themselves. As mentioned openmicroblogger is a protocol that does exactly what is required – as long as two different services speak openmicroblogger, they can communicate.

Identi.ca is a hosted service that talks openmicroblogger, and laconi.ca is the open source version (Identi.ca, as you know is built on laconi.ca). It’s already based on OAuth (the fact it uses OpenID has nothing to do with the protocol itself – you can build a openmicroblogging system without OpenID).

So what we actually need to make this stuff move forward is to get twitter/plurk/pownce etc etc talking openmicroblogger. Not THAT is the blocker

I too believe that we need to have a better/free flow of conversations across the services and the walled garden approach needs to change. Also we need ways to manage our conversations across various services better.

We at kwippy are addressing the problem in our own way by

1) Providing a platform for people to have conversations over social objects(status messages) from other networks say Gtalk,Yahoo IM and Facebook.

2) Providing RSS/Atom feeds for conversations that can be used and integrated with comments of a similar conversation you had elsewhere.

and more.

Cheers !!

Now, if only twitter, Facebook and the rest were to implement the standard and we’d really open things up!

As for the question of public/private, microblogs are certainly primarily private at the moment, but they are also rapidly evolving. Implementing various forms of privacy are actually an important part of what’s ahead for the standard as this will allow greater flexibility in the use of microblogs. For example, corporations could use them internally, ensure their staff communications were (mostly) contained within the company, while still allowing staff to subscribe to external public feeds and even making some internal communications publicly available (e.g. from the marketing/investor relations area).

It’s a rapidly moving landscape at the moment, and very exciting!

You might want to check the definition of “Microblogging” in Sean Carmody’s post a few minutes ago.

“a fast-flowing form of “public” communication”

And re:

“[open microbloggers] are not microblogging really, they are having asynchronous conversations”

Feeds/polling is not how open microblogging works. Instead, each service “broadcasts” its “tweets” in real-time to subscribers no matter what server they are using.

— Brian

The problem I have found is that if you use an OpenID to login with a laconi.ca server and try and connect to non public feed you are pretty much out of luck. Let alone then plug the laconi.ca into your social network of distributors, which is really just a poor OpenID implementation of others. But it doesn’t help with the bigger picture does it.

If has been assumed that the microblogging is for the public feeds only. Which in many cases I know of is not the case.

You see people are not microblogging really, they are having asynchronous conversations.

“What is really needed is an open API driven Open Messaging service, a true commenting open service that will allow you to have a conversation from one service to another”

It’s called the http://openmicroblogging.org protocol, and it’s currently driving a network of maybe 100 servers or so. The biggies are http://identi.ca and http://army.twit.tv — you can choose http://laconi.ca or http://openmicroblogger.org software for your own service.

“You can have your own server true, but it’s still closed”.

Huh? Wha?

“We don’t see identi.ca messages in the other services.”

Eh? Wazat?