140Char

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

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.

I know Friday is the traditional day for a round-up post, but so much happens in the microblogosphere on a daily basis, all the 140char team have been busy, and Monday gives some nice alliteration:

• Some stats from Twitter on how the new SMS rules have affected UK Outbound SMS usage:

• Zygotweet and tweetSMS plan to offer Twitter via SMS in the UK (Via Twitterholics)
• Useful and interesting list and stats for newspapers on Twitter (Well, American ones!).
• Jaiku got hit by a power failure at the data center provider for their web servers earlier today, but is back online.
• Plurk has had some minor design and usability upgrades.
• Pownce has integrated FireEagle, which means all your uploads and messages can now be automatically geo-tagged with your location.
• Tumblr now allows you to search within Tumblelogs.
• And Seesmic has a new and improved search function, and threaded player. The improvements to the player make it more and more a mini-application for your website and blog, which now lets you: -start a new conversation straight from where you are without having to leave the site, -reply to any video in private and not only in public. -post to twitter the link from your reply.

So not too much has happened!

In this recent age of the social network explosion, myself and others have identified the need to work to amalgate your activities to one central location to be able to maintain your internet identity namely, your own website.

It is the job of this personal website to act as a central repository for all you social networks and external websites so you aren’t lost over a million, slightly overlapping networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk and so on.

I am just in the process of moving my currently Wordpress powered website over to Tumblr for a few significant (to me) reasons:

• Firstly, it occurred to me that if I ever blogged anything of interest which hit a nerve ‘out there’ then a decent amount of sudden traffic would clean out my bank because of the hosting charges.
• I’m a fan of Wordpress and am always a bit of a control freak and felt inadequate if I didn’t host and fully run my own website. I’ve gotten over this a bit and feel that in this day and age, such website pride not needed. Also noting that plenty of web guru’s don’t host their own sites helped.
• Wordpress updates always give me chills and they are needed airly often. I have had upgrades go BADLY wrong before, with all posts having to be manually re-entered.
• Like moving to Mac, I wanted to have my blog just work and remove some of the temptation to fiddle with it all the time.
• I wanted something more streamline and neat.

And then there’s my main reasons..

I’ve had my Tumblr account for some time and wasn’t quite sure about the concept. It provides micro-blogging, of a sort, but where post types are defined into text, photo, link, quote, chat, audio, video. Each of these types has a pre-defined style applied to it meaning it makes it easy to quickly post different types of content that looks nice and the main template can be fully customised with HTML.

Tumblr can seem a bit backwards on first glance, especially when coming from a full blogging platform like Wordpress. There are no categories as such, no ‘pages’ (static posts outside of the blog/date system) and the only real navigation comes as PREV and NEXT pagination. But a system as Tumblr shines when you embrace the format - it’s meant a blog - a date ordered, ongoing series of updates from a personal point of view. The one-page, single list layout that is Tumblr gives a great blog format. It means, like a blog, the main emphasis is about what it going on now and the Tumblr ‘dashboard’ gives you the means to quickly post content with little other thought.

Tumblr also provides domain customising so that you CAN have the Tumblr blog using your own mydomain.com address.

Archiving on Tumblr is handled in a unique way. Posts are date organised on a page in a grid layout with actual post thumbnails of the posts you have made.

Tags have recently been introduced but unlike Wordpress, there aren’t any functions to have all those tags listed in a sidebar or anything. BUT apply a tag to a post automatically makes a url of it, so that a posts tagged personal, can then be accessed in date order via yourname.tumblr.com/tagged/personal meaning you could manually add a tag list if, like me, you have a fixed tag list, defined in advance.

But still the main reason to switch a whole website to something like Tumblr is that rather than your main website being a hub for other networks you use, it means that your website IS one of those networks. It means your website ITSELF can be added as a friend rather than giving someone your username for a particular social network and having the friend have to go off to that other site and add you.

This is technically where MySpace was so far ahead but most of us didn’t realise because it was/is so poorly implemented.

Having this setup means that the potential for self-promotion is greatly increased as your website is inside a network.

If only Twitter gave this functionality - image it: your twitter profile page WAS your website with custom HTML etc..?

It’s important for us to have an idea of what microblogging tools are most used by our readers. And so:

As microblogging evolves, I think there are going to be a lot of attempts to define what it is, and what sites qualify. And my own definition is somewhat unevolved at the moment, so I’m opening this one to you.

Do you think Tumblr counts as microblogging, and should be included in the site?

A lot of Tumblelogs tend to be short, sharp updates via the bookmarklet to quickly share a link, image, or video. At first I struggled with the idea of yet another site to sit between my main blog at TheWayoftheWeb, and my Twitter account. But I’ll admit that I didn’t think it through, despite playing around with an account.

I’ve got two blogs including this one, and my first, TheWayoftheWeb is fairly well established (Despite recently moving to Wordpress and self-hosting!). They give me the chance to post long form ideas, and develop theories, whilst also getting some interaction through the comments I’m fortunate to receive.

Meanwhile Twitter and Plurk give me as much conversation as I can cope with, within the confines of 140 characters (See, the blog name does make sense!).

But having chatted to two of my colleagues about blogging, Tumblr makes a lot of sense for them. They don’t have the time to commit to a full blog, or the conversation required to get the full value out of Twitter - and yet they both want to have an online presence and a place to share the things they value. And it seems to offer a way to display their personality in a slightly more obvious way than using Del.icio.us.

So that’s my case for why it’s useful, and picking some Tumblelogs at random, they show the short form, frequent updates we’d associate with microblogging. Here’s 3 examples picked totally at random from those listed on the front page of the site:

Example 1.

Example 2.

Example 3.

So what say you? Personally I’m leaning towards inclusion…