Where’s the microblogsphere?
When talking about microblogging I often see this question asked: “What can you say in 140 characters?” My answer is “Maybe a sentence, sometimes with a citation.” That falls within 140 characters but it’s missing too much, which is why I’m writing this short post.
Most people I talk to hear “microblogging” and put too much emphasis on one of the two benefits of blogging. Blogging is a printing press in the home of everyone with an internet connection and it’s also a conversation.
It’s hard to say much of worth in such short confines when you look at it alone. A stream of posts from a single author would have been much more conveniently read in a small blog posting. To think of microblogging only as a publishing tool is to overlook other areas of value. The problem I see is while there’s a blogsphere, there’s no microblogsphere.
Conversations on Twitter happen in through tracking keywords and hashtags. Back when Twitter had an official IM client I used it to track dozens of keywords and hashtags. Tracking meant that Twitter would notify me the instant one was used, and I’d be able to respond instantly through my phone or IM client. Unfortunately that was killed off.
There’s still a few easy ways to track keywords on Twitter. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of a search query and mash it up any way you want or you can use Tweetdeck.
The problem so far is that this all relates to Twitter. Right now I can think of at least two open source microblogging applications, laconi.ca and OpenMicroBlogger. Jaiku will eventually be open sourced. There’s already dozens of proprietary ones and the number of installations of open ones is slowly growing. The community is too fragmented.
The two open source applications support the open micro blogging specification which lets you subscribe to microbloggings of users of another site, similar to how users of a Jabber IM can usually add someone to their list who’s on another server. It’s not implemented on the most popular servers, but it fixes half of the problem with conversation.
What it doesn’t fix is being able to reply. Since addressing a reply is done in-band, that is inside the message itself, including the server the recipient is on robs you of scarce message space. If you don’t include the server then you run into name collissions. Am I addressing a message to lance_ on Twitter or identi.ca or Jaiku or what?
The proposed OpenMicroBlogger 0.2 spec might solve that by including a hidden out-of-band variable to the message, similar to how Twitter did so with the specific message ID that you’re repling to. Each time you do something like this you’re fragmenting the users into “users of clients who support that feature” versus “users of clients who don’t support that feature.”
What’s it going to take to have a microblogsphere? Communities will need top open up and support OpenMicroBlogging or similar, and some hard choices are need to be made to compromise between preserving message space and vital features.
