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Twitter is a form of microblogging that provides micromessaging capabilities. It doesn't use push technology or XMPP due to technical limitations. Something li

Twitter is a form of microblogging that provides micromessaging capabilities. It doesn't use push technology or XMPP due to technical limitations. Something like OpenMicroblogging could give way to players that provide push technologies, better long-term search, and are more open with their data (Twitter firehose). Twitter is just the incumbent player in this developing space, and has many high-profile users as MySpace once did. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMicroBlogging I'd like to see instant messaging somehow better incorporated into Twitter.

rcoder 18y ago
XMPP was a core part of Twitter's feature-set from the earliest days. Delivery became a bit (cough) "spotty" in early 2008 or so, and has been turned off AFAIK for a while now. That being said, there's no reason it couldn't be a part of their product offering again, if the obvious security and peer-server throttling issues could be resolved. OpenMicroBlogging, while an interesting idea in the abstract, suffers from combo of feature bloat (license info per post/link) and missing core items (no baked-in Atom/RSS feed support, no friend/follow listing in profile) that make it far from a "Twitter-killer" out of the box. Furthermore, the "reference implementation" laconi.ca is a bog-standard PHP/MySQL app. Since many of the complaints about Twitter's dominance stem from frustration with their uptime and scalability, it hardly seems realistic to pin our hopes for a better, more reliable future on a collection of PHP scripts running on a bazillion cheap shared hosting boxen. In fact, WordPress + P2 (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2 http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2) seems like a much more potentially-disruptive technology to me. OMB may be much more carefully designed to preserve security, license terms, and privacy, but we've seen time and time again that normal users don't really care about those things. They want a clean, usable UI, and readily-available documentation and support for a commonly-available product.
- adrianwaj 18y ago
  Right, if Twitter could get their XMPP features back-in, it would be quite an amazing service. It would work like an IM, real conversations could take place.

rcoder 18y ago

XMPP was a core part of Twitter's feature-set from the earliest days. Delivery became a bit (cough) "spotty" in early 2008 or so, and has been turned off AFAIK for a while now. That being said, there's no reason it couldn't be a part of their product offering again, if the obvious security and peer-server throttling issues could be resolved. OpenMicroBlogging, while an interesting idea in the abstract, suffers from combo of feature bloat (license info per post/link) and missing core items (no baked-in Atom/RSS feed support, no friend/follow listing in profile) that make it far from a "Twitter-killer" out of the box. Furthermore, the "reference implementation" laconi.ca is a bog-standard PHP/MySQL app. Since many of the complaints about Twitter's dominance stem from frustration with their uptime and scalability, it hardly seems realistic to pin our hopes for a better, more reliable future on a collection of PHP scripts running on a bazillion cheap shared hosting boxen. In fact, WordPress + P2 (http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2 http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/p2) seems like a much more potentially-disruptive technology to me. OMB may be much more carefully designed to preserve security, license terms, and privacy, but we've seen time and time again that normal users don't really care about those things. They want a clean, usable UI, and readily-available documentation and support for a commonly-available product.

adrianwaj 18y ago
Right, if Twitter could get their XMPP features back-in, it would be quite an amazing service. It would work like an IM, real conversations could take place.