140Char

New site Twingr offers the chance to set up your own microblogging community on a hosted platform - unlike previous options like Laconi.ca, which required you to install the service on your own server.

It seems like a no brainer, but I think there’s one major flaw in the service - critical mass.

One of the successful implentations of Laconica, is Leo Laporte’s TWiT Army, fed from the TWiT Netcast Network, and therefore having enough of a community and interaction to ensure a reasonably constant flow of updates. Meanwhile, there are several options for corporate enterprise solutions, notably Yammer, as a hosted microblogging platform.

But Twingr is external facing, and relies on people wanting to create a group fo sufficient interactivity to seperate itself from the crowd - yet not wanting to host the service, and therefore removing any options to monetise it.

For those small groups, a more general service like Ning would probably offer more scope for interaction, allowing you to upload images and files etc, as well as messaging and forums, meaning a stronger community from a smaller number of participants.

And there’s also no scope to check out and join existing groups, meaning that duplication and confusion may lead to ever smaller splinter groups - is there a need for microblogging for a group of 5 friends who already communicate via IM, Twitter, Facebook etc?

Having said that, if you’re interested, here’s the introductory video - and if you do use it, I’d be really interested in hearing how you get on:

In a slightly odd pairing, political eco figure Al Gore and successful professional blogger Darren Rowse both had microblogging news to unveil while I was off on vacation. And the less significant part for me personally, is that Al Gore has his own Twitter account.

More significant was the news that the man behind Problogger and one of four behind the B5media network, has launched TwiTip, a new blog dedicated to Twitter Tips.

Uh-oh.

Darren’s being pretty open about the process and techniques he’s using for the new blog, but the fact he’s already seeing up to 2000 users per day, and has over 1300 RSS subscribers within a few days due to his previous success and fame could be a bit depressing! I have to admit being tempted by Web 1.0 Darkside thinking a little.

Web 1.0: ‘Well, the game is over now. Him and another couple of A-listers will just hoover up the entire audience.’

Web 2.0: ‘Every new blog/person is a good thing for attracting and engaging more people and providing new perspectives.’

Web 1.0: ‘But he’s got a larger audience in a week than 140char has after 6 months.’

Web 2.0: ‘Doesn’t matter. It’s just a reason to ensure I work harder on making this place different and valuable enough that it succeeds in it’s own right and stands out - and maybe Darren will send some traffic by!’

At the end of the day, I wish Darren all the success he’ll doubtless get, and it hasn’t changed my thoughts on the future state of the site too much - initially it looks like he’s continue his tactic of providing great tuitional and instructive guides etc, which will be just as useful to me as other people - and I was already intending to take this blog in a slightly different direction anyway. Especially as I like to play and break new apps and sites, rather than feeling like I’m writing a game guide.

The only thing that does disapoint me a little is the fact Darren is publicly asking for submissions for Twitips and has already received loads of content, which is doubtless coming from Problogger readers who see a chance to get more coverage for their own websites and blogs - it might have been nice to have seen some recognition of the sites already here like Microblink, Twitterapps,  Twitterholics, Twittermaven, etc.

And obviously if anyone, A-list or otherwise, fancies being involved in a site dedicated to microblogging, you’re always welcome to get involved here!

While I was offline and on holiday, I started thinking about permanence and the ‘half-life’ of content and ideas. Is print a better medium for archiving content, in the event all electronic systems are turned off or destroyed in a catastrophe? Or is the electronic medium far better for simply getting an idea into the world, where it may take on a life of it’s own?

Originally it was a comparison between print and blogging, but reading some recent posts from bloggers listing referrals, I noticed how many were crediting large numbers of referrals from Twitter as a direct result of friends and followers retweeting their messages.

That struck a chord, as I tend to be online between 9am and midnight (sometimes 1 or 2am) so I get to see various timezones conversing - and I wonder how much I miss when I’m sleeping or avoiding microblogging to concentrate on other tasks. Unless I set up RSS feeds for every possible keyword, and constantly trawl through archives, there’s always going to be a huge amount of content that is published when I’m not there to see it - and the same it true for almost everyone using microblogging.

Which is why microblogging is probably the best test of a concept or an idea. Not only do you have to fit the pitch into 140 characters, but for it to reach a significant number of relevant people around the globe it needs to be retweeted by a significant number - easy if you have thousands of followers, but unless you’re in the top few Tweeters, for example, it’s purely down to the strength of your idea.

That’s much different to blogging, as tools like RSS are effective at archiving days or weeks of content which can be scanned fairly quickly and efficiently. And it’s obviously different to the print mechanisms of old.

It’s another benefit of the microformat over the longform for getting quicker feedback and response on an idea - although I’d hesitate to drop an entire simply down to a lack of responses - simple requests for messages I’ve posted have had a response rate of around 8% of my followers within an hour or so, which is pretty damn impressive, but if the idea is relevant to the other 90% it might take a while to reach them!

Note: Thinking about it after finishing this post, there may be the subconcious influence of this post by Dave Cushman, regarding responses on Twitter and Focus Groups vs Communities of Purpose.

When Dan asked me to look after 140Char while he is off sampling the delights of foriegn lands I was a little unsure. Yes I have Tumblr and a Twitter accounts but I’m hardly the most prolific poster.

But today I was introduced to a very cool web app called Evernote. I know it has been around for a while but it is out of private beta now and available for all.

Evernote for Windows (also available for Mac, iPhone, mobile and web) - Thanks to bluelectric on Flickr

Once I got over my excitement at how this very useful productivity app is going to save me from the clutches of my addled brain. I noticed that Evernote has a very useful function that allows you to put certain notes in a public folder that publishes them blog-style with a handy little RSS feed.

I’ve already added the feed to my Tumblog and I think I’m going to to be using it quite a bit from now on.

Now I know you can email posts to Tumblr but to be honest I have only used it once and that was just for a test.

So what’s the diference? you ask. Well for me the real benefit is that it will be part of something that I am already using extensively, so the leap from making a note for myself to making a note that I think will be useful for other people is only a small one.

Unlike things like Twitter, which I can see is very useful but don’t have the time to dedicate to building up that network, it will immediately be useful to me and the (micro) blogging thing will just come as an added benefit that I can work on slowly.

Even if you don’t want to use it to add to your blogging arsenal you should still check out Evernote. It is one of the best memory aids I have ever seen.

This post was added by Angus Farquhar, Online Video Producer

I’ve realised that although I’ve been blogging just as often at my social media blog, TheWayoftheWeb.net, my frequency here has slipped a bit.

I’m starting to wonder whether that’s due to the fact I’m spending more time on my day job and other matters, or whether the financial situation etc has meant less focus on the microblogging boom? There is certainly a change of focus by the majority of blogs I’m reading, and what coverage remains in general blogging is generally all about Twitter and monetisation. Perhaps it’s also the fact Twitter has led the way to the mainstream with the arrival of celebrities from the wider world, rather than just social media agencies and bloggers!

I don’t think a period of slight consolidation is a bad thing - for one thing it might allow us more time to consider which applications really are more useful, and which are just adding to the noise. It might also give me a bit more time to actually play around with alternatives to Twitter. I gave up on Yammer after just a few days, and suddenly found in my absence a new group of colleagues had joined! I rarely get a chance to Plurk, Pownce or Jaiku (can any noun be a verb?). And then there’s getting a decent camera to use with Seesmic, Mobatalk, 12 Seconds etc.

Then there’s updating the tools list - for instance, there’s a new, improved version of Posty to play with (v1.6). And getting some more interesting people to interview about their microblogging or their application.

And there’s the long-needed recommendations for the other blogs which focus on their area. I have a few in my RSS list and more appearing all the time, so it’s about time I shared some link love.

I might even get time to find where all my other volunteer authors on here have vanished to!

So a bit of a quiet spell definitely wouldn’t be a bad thing - but I just know there’s a revoluntionary new app or tool around the corner!

Twitter works for me . . . . usually

I’ve been using Twitter for about 4 months now.  Because I was a late adopter, I didn’t have to work too hard to get a small list of followers and I was happy with the social chatter and light hearted banter that goes on.  I rather like knowing what is happening in Canada, Singapore, Seattle and around UK as a kind of “ambient awareness”.  I occasionally trade links and tips, and pimp my own blog a bit.

My first Twitter experiment

This week, I got ambitious and tried a little experiment.  Inspired by a list of “e learning experts” who Twitter, I wondered what it is like to follow a social media celebrity.  I do follow some celebs, but I know them personally.  I’ve shared a meal with them - so that is different.  This is following the guru the way other people do.

I picked the first name of the list.  It happened to be @amcafee, the Professor at Harvard.  Good choice, because I am genuinely interested in his work on Enterprise 2.0.

Well, I didn’t get the great social media effect.  I suppose you don’t all the time.  Anyway, @amcafee twittered that he didn’t know why he had so many new followers.  It seemed many people had the same idea as I.  Immediately I replied with a tweet explaining the list that billed him.  Returning from London late the following evening, I half expected an @jotoo Thanks for the info.  Nothing.  Only a tweet explaining why he had more followers and pointing to the list.  Hmm…

The e-learning specialists on Twitter

Well, the Prof pointed to the list, so I had another look.  There are quite few Brits but not the godfather of online education, Chris Hambly.  @biz, Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter is on the list, but no one else was listed as a Twitter or micro-bloggiing experts.  Fascinating.

Well, how many people use Twitter and micro-blogging to teach?  We need to add ourselves to the list!

It feels weird to publish a post effectively blowing our own trumpets, but this was too good not to share. A quick look around for other interesting sites covering microblogging revealed 140char.com is the #1 return for a Google search for ‘microblogging blog’.

Wahey!

That would be the almighty Wikipedia below us!

To justify the post a bit more, I did a quick bit of playing around for the following searches:

‘microblogging blog’ 1,250,000 results.

‘twitter blog’ 41,600,000 results. (And we’re nowhere near as high!)

‘jaiku blog’ 3,830,000 results.

‘pownce blog’ 2,570,000 results.

‘plurk blog’ 2,460,000 results.

‘identi.ca blog’ 392,000 results.

‘yammer blog’ 258,000 results.

A quick look at Google Trends echoes these results. I won’t embed the graph because Twitter skews it so far that everything else is just a blurred line at the bottom.

However:

It’ll be interesting to see whether open source microblogging and services which can be manually deployed behind the corporate firewall is demanded as much as enterprise options set-up and hosted by a third party. I suspect the current data is skewed somewhat by the mentions of Yammer winning the TechCrunch 50!

Picked up via Pistachio Consulting, is Jeremy Pepper’s post on ‘Twitteriocy’, or some simple rules on how to use a corporate Twitter account, and basic etiquette - inspired by a personal encounter with someone following him.

While I don’t think microblogging benefits from too strict a set of rules, the guidelines he lays out are simple and provide a pretty good grounding.

Be yourself, don’t follow everyone back, use a decent client like Tweetdeck, be engaged, be personable, be responsive, be a person, and remember that social media, including microblogging, doesn’t work for every company or individual.

So something very similar to the best practice for all social media!

I’d add:

• Be realistic, and don’t expect 1000 followers overnight, or 1000 referrals from every link you post.
• Stick with it - if you’re going to use these tools, be prepared for the mid-to-long term commitment needed. It took me two attempts at using Twitter to understand why it was so invaluable and addictive. And far longer to try and find the right level between addiction and a reasonable amount of time investment.
• It might still be worth registering your brand name to stop ‘brandjacking‘, but use it to lead people to your real representatives.

Any more?

As an Englishman (albeit one with a degree in American Studies), I’ve followed the U.S presidential nominations with a fairly casual interest, and with a slight leaning towards one candidate, but not enough that I’m going to talk about it.

Instead, I’m going to proclaim this the ‘Twitter Election’, and the sign of how news and reporting is changing for the better. First up is Twitter’s own Election 2008. It’s fascinating to watch the opinions and messages appearing every second, although the fact that it seems to be based around the keywords of candidates names means I’m tempted to tweet about McCain oven chips and see if it appears!

What’s interesting is how public service broadcaster C-Span has integrated Twitter, Blog coverage, Video, a Debate timeline and a keyword list into the ‘Debate Hub‘. It’s a great example of how ‘aggregation of sources of information provides a starting point for a media company to add it’s own expertise and reason to provide something of value.‘ Sorry, thought that sentence was worth highlighting, although other people have been saying the same thing for a while.

I’ve talked in the past about Twitter providing a news mechanism that trumps mainstream media for events like earthquakes. And I’ve taken a look at what mainstream media needed to do to utilise the new tools available or become increasing irrelevant.

But events like the death of Heath Ledger, or the various earthquakes around the world had a much more striking effect for those that were on Twitter at the time than for the majority of non-microbloggers waking up hours later and being perfectly happy with the coverage they were broadcast - because they weren’t up at 2am to witness how radically different it could be.

This time, it’s an event which has been flagged up in advance, allowing the word to spread - and it’s increasingly being adopted by various mainstream media sources to a greater or lesser extent, allowing far more people to see the benefits of microblogging over traditional coverage.

And I predict we’ll see more and more of this in the coming months, even with controversies like the decision from an U.S. newspaper and website to Twitter live from a child’s funeral. Whether or not it was the correct way to treat that particular situation at the current time, it’s a sign that the boundaries are shifting, and going past simply acknowledging Twitter coverage. And for microblogging to hit the mainstream, the boundaries need to be a long way further down the road than the mass adopters.

I think it’s also the reason for Twitter moving towards grouping, as much as for users. It’s why I was interested in the previously posted quote by Ev Williams, saying that groups are coming. I don’t think it’s necessarily about just Twitter for enterprise as an inward facing tool. I think in Twitter’s case it will also be about groups and tools for outward facing use by companies, which is why they’ve been seemingly slow to respond to Yammer, Present.ly etc.

It’s about raising routes to monetise from enterprise, but also providing the tools to grow the userbase to drive significant revenue. Facebook does OK at 100 million active users per month - Twitter has about 2.5 million registered used. And that mainstream exposure could be the push it needs.

Well, I expressed reservations about how many organisations would find use from Techcrunch 50 winner Yammer, and have a strange feeling that in many cases I might be proved right.

For example, the corporate Yammer group I’m in has 11 members, a few unanswered invites, and a three day gap between posts. Three days should not pass between posts on a microblog, particularly when it was only me posting for the last four days! And that’s despite a few of my usual web geek colleagues popping up.

Compare that to my Tweetstats, despite being pretty busy over the last few days. Part of the reason is that, like Johnny Five in Short Circuit, I need input. Yammer almost seems like a training pool before venturing into the Olympic pool with the grown-ups on Twitter. And that’s regardless of the fact Yammer has opened up it’s API.

There’s quite an interesting post by Chris Brogan on how the Twhirl client support for the open source, on your own servers Twitter, Laconi.ca, means that Yammer is irrelevant.

Incidentally, after Del.icio.us became delicious.com, it seems really strange to see identi.ca, laconi.ca, present.ly (the other corporate microblogging offering) etc!

I was going to use the Twit (This Week In Tech) Army example of self-hosted microblogging, but with comedy timing, the site appears to be down!

Two websites are currently showing the way the microblogging format can be used outside of pure conversation. But although the pair even have similar names, they take totally different approaches. I’ve previously covered ‘Twitter radio’ Blip.fm, but somehow I’ve neglected to cover the other major twist on microblogging, Blippr.  (You can find me using it, here)

But what is interesting about the system is that it not only allows for 160 character reviews of entertainment (music, films, books, videogames), but the focus of the company behind it is concentrated more on the recommendation side of things than purely Twitter for reviews, which means they’re taking on some big names (Disclosure: It also means they play in a similar space to ditto.net, which I do some work with).

What is Blippr in 140 char?

(Jonathan): A community of people looking to discuss, discover and organize books, games, movies and music. In 160 characters or less, of course.

Your company (Tag Team Interactive) has a focus on social relationships and recommendations - what inspired this philosophy?

(Jonathan): My business partner and I just know and see the value in personal recommendations–the ones you receive from your family, your close friends, even just acquaintances. There’s an explicit amount of trust that you extend those influences in your life and you don’t need to come to understand. Recommendations across other platforms, like Amazon or Netflix for example, take time to train and come to trust. There’s this sort of “black box” effect. You’re not sure exactly why the item they’re recommending is a fit for you. However, if your good friend said “You have to see Pineapple Express, it’s hilarious”, it doesn’t require the same amount of learned trust. You already know you can trust that person. It causes even that much more drive to go out and see that movie.

Your company website mentions Blippr is your second application, but what was the first? Was it related to Blippr, and did your previous applications and websites have a direct effect on how Blippr was created?

(Jonathan): Our first was Judge-O-Rama, a site focused on enabling people to resolve their conflicts and contests in a head-to-head context. We like to think of it as our “practice app.” It was just something fun and entertaining, not quite as useful or focused as blippr. Judge-O-Rama was definitely instrumental in our working together, though, and at least serving as the inspiration to us starting to work together. In terms of how this served in blippr’s creation, I think this blog post will give you a good idea of how blippr started.

Who do you see as your competitors? Does it include Blip.fm? What are the advantages of Blippr?

(Jonathan): We don’t view Blip.fm as a direct competitor, per se. They’re doing the micro-thing, but we’re not trying to create a me-too “Twitter for reviews” application. That’s the obvious connotation most people make, given the review constraints, but we’re far more focused on developing the social recommendation and organization pieces than we are a simple micro-review platform. As such, we view our competitors more along the lines of Flixster, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Shelfari, iLike, Trusted Opinion, and a few others. Obviously one of our key advantages is our focus on not just one particular entertainment categories–movies or books or music or games–but on all of the above (we also plan on adding TV in the future). Furthermore, I think if you look at most of those sites, while they have solid communities, we’ve tried to make the participation process as simple as possible to encourage more participation. Also, last but not least, I would say that our focus on integrating with as many platforms as possible is a big differentiator. You can connect your blippr account with Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Identi.ca, Tumblr, Facebook, Last.fm, GoodReads, LibraryThing, Amazon, and others, which is obviously a great opportunity for our users’ opinions and reviews. Those are some of the high level advantages, at least.

Obviously you’re monetising the site through Amazon, but do you have any further plans to drive revenue you can disclose? With traffic growing, was it a conscious decision not to include display advertising?

(Jonathan): We would say that commerce through various sites will definitely be a large share of revenue, but we do intend on eventually displaying ads that are relevant to blipprs’ userbase, as well. Obviously, the primary intent there is to offer entertainment advertisers a place to capture people who truly are interested in entertainment media and looking to make a decision. But we very much aim to make it a value-add to users first, then advertisers. Jeremy Liew, of Lightspeed Venture Partners, wrote a great blog post a while back on the topic of endemic advertising, which I believe really showcases blippr’s revenue opportunity.

Blippr users can cross-publish to Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku and Pownce. Do your users tie into the audience figures for those sites, or has there been any surprises? And is that the main word of mouth that is driving new registrations?

(Jonathan): This is assuredly a large driver of how people are discovering blippr, but I wouldn’t say that’s the main word of mouth driving registrations. Email invites sent from users have also been a large driver. In terms of surprises, I wouldn’t say there have been too many. Most connections have been with Twitter and Facebook. The rest are pretty much equally spread.

Are there any of the cross-publishing sites which are easier or harder to integrate into?

(Jonathan) That would be a question for my co-founder and business partner, Chief Executive Geek, Chris Heald. Some have taken more time than others. Obviously Facebook takes far more time than any of the others due to building an application for the platform, which is much more than just a cross-publish opportunity. iPhone and OpenSocial integrations will be the next difficult pieces for us, but they are coming.

Does scaling prove as problematic for Blippr as it has done for Twitter? There seem to have been some timeouts recently when I’ve been using Blippr?

(Chris): I don’t think scaling is going to be anywhere near the problem for us that it has been for Twitter; our architecture and product design is a good deal different than Twitter’s, so we avoid many of the specific design issues that they’ve had problems scaling. We have had some timeouts lately, but those were due to some rather exceptional circumstances, and a lack of hardware to fail over gracefully to (in those cases, the problems weren’t scaling issues so much as our primary app server going down without a graceful failover - that’s since been corrected). We’re still getting this thing off the ground, so our infrastructure is very much in its infancy (though we’ve been working lately to address that!). However, we have built this thing with an eye towards scaling, and don’t foresee any major problems in doing so as we move forward. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, but we’ve worked very hard to build a flexible product, and hope to see it grow about as quickly as we can keep up with it!

Do you plan to focus on utilising a microblogging format as the logical mechanism for your relationship and recommendation applications?

(Jonathan): The main inputs for our recommendations are explicit relationships (who you follow), agreements with other peoples’ blips, and the ratings you give titles. (Chris): I don’t think the microblogging format could necessarily be described as the mechanism for our relational/recommendation tools - the other data we’re collecting drives that - but the microblogging format uniquely contributes to this aim in that it encourages extremely high levels of participation, and thus, results in more useful data being present in the system for us to draw conclusions from. It is absolutely a key component to the success of these other components that we have built, even if it isn’t the primary mechanism by which these processes work. Whether we’d use it in future similar applications, I can’t say, but we’re both big fans of the behaviors that it encourages, and would very likely consider it.

And are there any Blips on products which have really shocked, surprised or amused you?

(Jonathan): Good question. It’s hard to pare down to just a single blip or two. Seriously, I can say that I am the biggest fan of blippr. As a huge movie geek myself, I’m constantly reading through blips and finding myself agreeing, laughing, vehemently disagreeing, and more. While some people fault blippr’s micro-format and say that you can’t really know whether something is good or bad within 160 characters, I say, read for yourself. You’ll be surprised!

One of the better microblogging clients available at the moment is Posty, createdby Cesare Rocchi.

It’s an Adobe Air applications which runs on Windows (2000/XP/Vista), MacOsx (10.4.9 or more), and even Linux! And besides the fact it runs behind proxies, it feeds out to Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Tumblr, Friendfeed, and Identi.ca.

So I got in touch with Cesare to get an idea of what was behind Posty, and what he plans for the future.

What is Posty in 140chars?

Posty in a small desktop application which allows browsing/updating your profile on twitter, jaiku, pownce, tumblr, friendfeed, identi.ca.

What makes it different from other cross-posting applications?

Posty has one of the smallest memory footprint. Although Adobe Air does not allow developers to fully manage memory usage, Posty is optimized to use as little memory as possible.
To my knowledge Posty is the only standalone desktop application which supports SIX services and allows a rich browsing experience. For example you can watch videos and pictures right in Posty! Check pownce, tumblr or friendfeeed for an example.
Finally, unlike web applications, Posty encrypts and stores sensible data like passwords on your hard drive, instead of third party servers.

How long did it take to create the initial version?

The first version, which included twitter and jaiku took two months to develop.
Let me say that Posty is a project that I develop during my spare time. So when I say “two months” I mean “the spare time that I had during two months”. I can’t quantify more than that.

Was Adobe Air easy to work with? Does it offer significant advantages?

Adobe Air was pretty easy to work with. Posty has grown as a response to two needs I had: to learn Adobe Air and to save some time in interacting with my online communities.

I think I am on the way I expected to be. One of the main advantages of Adobe Air is the ability of quickly changing the layout of the application. Without getting too technical the VBox, a container to display whatever thing you want vertically, is a great idea. So for initial prototypes it is just perfect.
As you project grows you need some discipline to avoid melting too much the logic and the graphics. For example, after the first prototype (which I confess I did just for my personal use), I redesigned the application along the lines of MVC pattern. So if, by chance, I hit my head and I forget anything about Posty, by looking at the MVC structure of my code I quickly “remember” where to put my hands.

How long has it been live? And is it gaining many users, judging by the good response it’s received?

I released the first version of Posty at the end of April. I remember I didn’t even had a website, so the release was made by attaching the air file to an email message.
Posty is gaining users every day and received a good response. I receive emails of encouragement and suggestion. People are also willing to test beta versions. This is fundamental to me, because I get almost immediate feedback on new features or solved bugs.

Are any of the microblogging services more difficult to integrate with? I noticed it took a couple of tries to verify my Jaiku account for example?

Maybe you did it while Jaiku was updating their servers. Yet Jaiku has not implemented an appropriate api to verify credentials, so I exploit a trick. BTW Jaiku to me has a lot of potential and I expect they extend api support to other functionalities. I didn’t find particular difficulties during the implementation. The testing is often the phase which takes more time. Unfortunately some network rely on servers which are hit every second by hundred thousand requests and your testing can get slow. I remember the “flying whale” days of twitter … testing new functionalities was a nightmare. Same for Pownce some time.
A special mention to Friendfeed, which was the most reliable api service I had to do with. And let me “celebrate” to the tumblr api as the simplest and cleanest and well-documented api I have worked with.
Finally, I think I’ll have some issue with Facebook, which I’ll integrate soon and which is known to be a less “friendly” api for desktop applications.

Are you going to continue simply to ask for donations to monetise Posty? Or would you be tempted to introduce advertising?

At the moment I’ll keep on asking for donations. BTW thanks to those who donated so far and thanks to those who will donate. Even a small donation is precious to me. Also encouragement messages, blog posts and suggestions are considered a donation. So if you like Posty, or have an idea on  how to extend it, just drop me a line. I appreciated it a lot.

Has it raised your profile throughout the internet?

I can’t tell the difference before and after Posty. For sure my online activity has been influenced by the growth of Posty (read less free time for me and more emails to reply to). But the most evident improvement is that it takes much much less time to send my updates/news across different networks and to address the incoming messages/replies. Attempting a measurement I’d say I spend half of the time and save a lot of clicks.
Let me also mention a cognitive aspect. Posty concentrates in a “place” a set of activities (update twitter, check Pownce replies, etc). Wanna do one of those activities? open Posty. Busy doing other stuff? Just close Posty to avoid distractions. Within a browser this border fades and, at least to me, it is easy to interrupt an activity to update/check my twitter, just because I noticed that a tab on twitter was left open (accidentally).
With Posty I feel I am more focused on my current activity.

Have you got more plans for improving Posty?

Yes. I have many items on the todo list: a brighter look and feel, facebook support, improvements on the interaction with the graphical interface. And a special feature which I am planning since a while. But can’t tell more.

What’s your view on cross-posting? Obviously Posty makes it far easier, but do you think cross-posting is possible without it becoming almost like spam? Do you have any tips for users?

First, don’t just ask questions. Many tend to get without giving. I think giving is important. Contribute with ideas, suggestions, whatever you feel it improves things. Second, choose as carefully as possible your friends contacts. It’s not easy to foresee how active a person will be, but if you see that the last 100 updates are about knitting and you hate knitting you shouldn’t click add/follow. Indeed try to find and add people who share some interest with you.
Final tip. Given that the number of friends/contacts is limited try to remove those who are less active, to make room for people more corresponding to you. You should not fear to click remove.

If you had to pick a favourite microblogging/lifestreaming site at gunpoint, which would you pick?

As for the service per se I’d pick Friendfeed, because their servers are very reliable. You might say that the interface is “spartan”, but I like the service and the scenarios it opens.
If we talk about people and responsiveness I’d say twitter and Pownce. Especially on Pownce I get almost immediate replies. Maybe this is because I was a beta tester and I collected many active friends. Of course twitter is still the most used/discussed/crowded service you can think of. And the one I use to stay in touch with the posty community via: http://twitter.com/_posty.

Make sure you don’t miss more interviews, including one with Blippr founders Jonathan C and Chris Heard on Thursday. You can always subscribe to the 140char RSS feed, here.