Tag: StatusNet

Leo Laporte Learns the Value of Federation

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Early this morning, famous podcasting personality Leo Laporte, Head TWIT over at the TWIT Network, posted on his Leoville blog a post titled Buzz Kill. Laporte had switched his microblogging over to the underappreciated Google Buzz, which he used to update Twitter. However, he discovered today, August 22nd, that none of his Buzz posts had been public since August 8th. As he puts it,

“Maybe I did something wrong to my Google settings. Maybe I flipped some obscure switch. I am completely willing to take the blame here. But I am also taking away a hugely important lesson. No one noticed. Not even me. …But I feel like I’ve woken up to a bad social media dream in terms of the content I’ve put in others’ hands. It’s been lost, and apparently no one was even paying attention to it in the first place. I should have been posting it here all along. Had I been doing so I’d have something to show for it. A record of my life for the last few years at the very least. But I ignored my blog and ran off with the sexy, shiny microblogs.”

You can read the full text at his blog here, but it does emphasize the thought processes we’ve been exploring as we learn about the federated social web. We have had some conversations with Evan Prodromou of Statusnet, among other people, as we try to understand this, and he was kind enough to send along some recommended reading since the last time we blogged about this.

We should own our own brand, and build its value at a site controlled by us. If you have an email address at a domain you control, you may have someone hosting it, but you can move it whenever you like. You have control. If you have your identity, and our email addresses and social media are part of the identity we build online, then the content is in your hands. Social media becomes a means of distribution, rather than a destination.

That is where the federated social web concept comes in. In a federated system, there are distinct entities that control parts of the system, but those parts are connected with agreed-upon rules to make a pleasing and usable whole. The World Wide Web is such a system. Email is such a system.

Statusnet instances aren’t for everyone, admittedly. Ours hasn’t attracted as many connections as Twitter, but gives us access to a different crowd. But what about blogging? Let’s take Gadget Wisdom.

  1. We write a blog entry.
  2. Our RSS feed updates. We use Feedburner to assist with that, but that isn’t required.
  3. We tweet the post to our Twitter account and dent it to our statusnet instance, so people know what we’re talking about. We still own the conversation.
  4. Our site draws in anyone talking about our tweet as comments on the post, thus bringing the discussion back to the blog.

Everything comes back to us. We are integrating social media into our site, not going out and relying on it exclusively. It is part of the reason that we don’t participate in Facebook but we do in Twitter. Twitter and similar microblogging paradigms works as a news delivery system, and can even be an alternative for RSS. Facebook has its status updates as well, but it is part of a bigger system that sees to tie everything together. We prefer to do that ourselves.

In case you didn’t get what we are saying…microblogging, social media, and sites such as Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, Google Buzz, etc should be a content delivery and enrichment system, not a content creation system. Now, we disagree with Leo that they are “an immense waste of time.” We just believe that he should change his approach to social media. Let’s all bring our identities under our control.

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So You Want to Only Use One Microblogging Service

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A highly simplified version of the RSS feed ic...
Image via Wikipedia

Last time, we discussed some of the things we’d learned about Status.net and the OStatus standard. Now, our understanding is far from perfect, but we keep trying to learn more. This is some of our attempt to summarize it.

So, here we are once again looking at how other services play with Status.net. We’ve covered the fact that Twitter doesn’t. Although, since Twitter has an API, a bridge has been created that imports the tweets into your timeline as notices. There is a Facebook bridge as well, but we have yet to test it, as we aren’t Facebook users.

But many sites do support standards that Status.net can use. A service has to be PuSh enabled. OStatus is reliant on the fact that most sites noawadays put out an Atom or RSS feed. The problem is real-time notification. That is where PubSubHubbub(PuSh) comes in. It is a simple extension to RSS and Atom feeds for real-time subscriptions. Basically, the feed declares a URL for the Hub server. Now, instead of the subscriber server/reader repeatedly polling the site to look for updates, it can register with the hub to be notified of updates.

That is how OStatus is built. Each site builds a feed of updates and uses PuSh subscriptions to send relevant updates to other sites, and each site is responsible for pushing those updates to the correct user. The rest of OStatus is also built on top of Atom feeds, including extensions to describe social activities like replies, following, user profile information, etc. As their wiki describes it: “the real beauty of it is that at this point we[OStatus] already have something useful, without anything StatusNet-specific. In fact you can already subscribe to someone’s public Google Buzz feed as an OStatus remote user, and they haven’t done anything special for us!”

So, there is one example. You don’t need to be on Google Buzz. If Google Buzz supports PuSh and OStatus, you can subscribe to their feed. Let’s go a step further:

  • WordPress – All the blogs on WordPress.com have PuSh enabled. If you run a WordPress blog elsewhere, you can set up your site as a Hub using a plugin like PushPress. If you are using Feedburner with Pingshot enabled, PuSh is already enabled and no plugin is needed. Sound useful? Why not subscribe to this blog, which is PuSh enabled, by entering the URL into the Remote Subscription option on your identi.ca/status.net account?
  • Tumblr – We tried the test-tumblr that the Status.net wiki used and that was recognized, but a random Tumblr site would not work.
  • Google Buzz – As mentioned above…we tried a few accounts and it does work. It is, of course, one-way.
  • Posterous – It would allow us to subscribe to a random posterous account we picked.

Status.net is working on some workarounds for additional integrations, but any established site can become PuSh enabled and thus support subscriptions in status.net. With a little extra work supporting the standard, they can support activity streams, replies, and other user events without any change in the user experience, except opening it up to interaction with any other site that supports those standards.

Imagine this a few months/years down the road if people support it. It would be like Email. Anyone can self-host or sign up for a social media account on whatever server they want, but anyone on any other server can communicate with them.

We’re in on the ground floor. We’re on our status.net which imports Twitter and lets us subscribe to any PuSh enabled site. And since we run it, we don’t have to worry about the service being discontinued or falling out of favor, because the next service is likely to be…if not immediately compatible, eventually bridged.

In the meantime, check out supporting PuSh on your site. Next time, we hope to have more to say about WebFinger…or how to tie your identity to a website.

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So You Want to Take Control of Your MicroBlogging

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Image representing StatusNet as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

If you haven’t heard of Twitter, you may have been living under a rock for the last few years. If you aren’t quite sure what it is, then you are not alone. People who have Twitter accounts aren’t quite sure what to do with them, and some people will disagree on the point of Twitter.

Twitter is the most popular example of microblogging, although Facebook, extremely popular, is mostly such a service. Twitter limits updates…or tweets to 140 characters. This limit has made URL shorteners popular. There are advantages to the brevity of microblogging, and inserting URL allows you to elaborate elsewhere. We use it not only to interact with those who share interests, but as a real-time substitute for RSS. RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is the standard for subscribing to blogs.

So, although some have agreed with us, it is important we don’t miss important information. Many Twitter clients only go back so far. And your Tweets are held closely by Twitter itself. Twitter can cancel your account at any time…they don’t need a reason. While you can appeal it, they owe you nothing. You aren’t paying for the service.

As Backupify, a service that backs up cloud services to its site for you, and provides them in downloadable form, stated, “Imagine if your phone company behaved in a similar fashion, disconnecting your phone number(s) because it didn’t care for the phone conversations you were having. Of course, that could never happen — and not (just) because of government regulation. You pay for your phone service, so the phone company has a certain financial incentive to care for your business. Facebook, Twitter, and most web apps are free. Zero dollars buys you zero service level guarantees. Never forget that you have access to Twitter and Facebook only so long as it is convenient and beneficial to them.”

Now, we do have an account with them, but we chose a different route. Being open-source enthusiasts, we looked for an open-source solution. We came up with StatusNet. It is a microblogging server written in PHP that implements the OStatus standard. OStatus is an open standard that allows people on different social networks to follow each other. It supports PUSH notification.

Diaspora, if it gets off the ground, is a proposal to replace Facebook with an open distributed platform. Anyone could run the software, thus allowing them to control their user data locally. Their local software would interact with other people’s to form a decentralized social network. It would thus work like an email address. Anyone could host your email…but you could choose to contract with someone to do so, and thus ensure a greater responsibility on the part of the provider, or choose a free option. The idea sounds great, and we wish them luck…

Unfortunately, without interoperability with existing services, it will likely occupy the same space as Identi.ca, the most popular and the original Status.net service. There are a lot of people happily on Identi.ca, but it is not a mainstream product.

We already had an Identi.ca account, but now we are running our own Status.net server. And Status.net supports a Twitter Bridge. It allows you to automatically send your notices to Twitter, send local “@” replies to Twitter, subscribe to your Twitter friends on the service, and import your Friends Timeline. The last is not enabled for Identi.ca, but allows you to import your friend’s tweets into your timeline. So, the Status.net server imports the Twitter data, which means that you have it on a server controlled by you.

Now, running your own server somewhere may be a bit too much for you. So Status.net offers single user instances, as well as private community instances. It is extensible with plugins. So any functionality you want could be built on top of it, or interact with.

Using the open standards it supports out of the box, you can subscribe to people from your status.net account who are on Google Buzz, Tumblr, Posterous, WordPress.com, Livejournal…etc.  140 characters isn’t required. You can set your instance to support 140 characters(Twitter Standard), or more or less than that.

Interoperability will hopefully lead to longevity. Even famous Twitter account ShitMyDadSays, has migrated to a Status.net instance. Having accounts on every single service can be confusing. If you can have an account on one service…and link to people on other services, isn’t that better?

We tried to ask a few questions of the founder of Status.net, in regards to how people were using the Twitter integration specifically, but the question was a bit open-ended, and thus we did not quite get all the answers we’re still looking for. Either way, it’s fun to play with.

More on this to come. In the meantime, any questions?

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