Hitwise is great about publishing timely tidbits about Web statistics and I look forward to seeing U.S., global and China stats contrasted. The first offering along those lines? Hitwise says that microblogging is more common in China than it is in the U.K., U.S., France, Canada, Australia or India. Sina Micro blog, the leading Chinese microblogging service, sees one out of every 158 website visits in China, Hitwise observed last month. That's more than 3.5 times as large a Web market share as Twitter has here in the US. That sounds like a good market to go monitor.

In the U.S., Facebook (which Hitwise does not count as microblogging) sees 64% of all social networking site visits. Why different social networks have found different levels of traction in different countries and cultures will be a fruitful field of study for the future. The investment of one of the most communicative of the Web analytics companies online into the large market of China could be a helpful step in our collective understanding of the changing international Web.

Features? What Features?

Besides this, though, TXT.io offers almost no other features. The service, for example, doesn't allow you to add images to a post and developers won't find an API to add to their tools. What TXT.io does offer, however, are RSS feeds and a mobile version of the site.

TXT.io is an experiment in minimalism and won't appeal to everybody. Indeed, "elitist microblogging" is the service's tagline. Sometimes, though, simple tools like this are exactly what it takes to bring us back to the basics. Minimalist text editors like Ommwriter or WriteRoom, for example, are popular because they only focus on one thing and do it extremely well.

In the absence of real interoperability between the different microblogging and messaging services, Twitter, which already has the most users, will only gain momentum. With Identi.ca and Laconi.ca, we do have real, open-source, standard-based alternatives to Twitter, but the sheer momentum behind Twitter will make it increasingly hard for newcomers to break through to a large enough audience.

In many ways, this is quite a shame, as most of the innovation around Twitter has come from third-party developers, while services like Rejaw, for example, tried out a lot of interesting features and user interfaces. Rejaw, for example, made 'real' real-time messaging a core feature of its platform.

While Google has not confirmed this new search engine just yet, the company's search products chief Marissa Mayer hints that there may have been something like this in the works at Google for some time now: "...we are interested in being able to offer, for example, micro-blogging and micro-messaging in our search. Particularly in Blog Search and possibly in Web Search, but we don't have any particular plans to announce". The Google Operating System blog points to this description used in Google's localization service as further evidence that there is something going on. It is allegedly a phrase that Google wants translated to be multilingual:

"Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format."

This is not proof-positive that Google is developing a microblogging search engine, but it makes sense that they would. Twitter and other microblogging platforms are rich with information could be used to rank messages. Reportedly the search results will appear based on frequently used keywords or current events, but a whole bunch of other factors could play a role in providing relevant results. The number of followers a person has, the author's authority in Twitter's social graph, replies, re-tweets, posting frequency and other stats could be used. We hope Google is paying attention to current microblogging trends and will include those results in any microblogging search engine it may or may not be working on.

StatusNet is the open-source microblogging platform that powers sites such as identi.ca, which impressed us from its inception as a "framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services." Read on for more details on what Vibber will be doing there.

Vibber hard at work at the Wikimedia Foundation office.

And according to this StatusNet announcement, Vibber's job description will revolve around "architecture and development of the core StatusNet microblogging software, as well as ancillary services to support the status.net platform." And in addition to launching a first release and public signup over the next few months, it is hoped by StatusNet leadership that Vibber's "natural skills as a mentor and leader will help build our Open Source developer and user community."

Although Vibber's new duties will commence on October 12, he will continue to be involved in Wikimedia development and will remain in the Wikimedia office until the end of 2009 "to make sure all our tech staff has a chance to pick my brain as we smooth out the code review processes and make sure things are as well documented as I like to think they are," he wrote.

In an interesting study in open-source, free-as-in-freedom/free-as-in-beer cross-pollination, StatusNet founder Evan Prodromou is also known for his work in the wiki community, launching Wikitravel and helping with MediaWiki development.

It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

However, there are other countries where the Chinese language is used in microblogging. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong come to mind. But even taken all together they don't amount to the estimated 485 million Internet and mobile Web users in China.

Twitter has had some success with its Translation Center, with 200,000+ translators across all languages. It's hard to beat inherent scale, though.

That's news to us. Everything these days is about Twitter, though. Go to a party--talk about Twitter. Have a blog? Talk about Twitter. Use Twitter? Talk about Twitter. Apparently we can add to that: facing legal pressure over allegedly anti-competitive business practices? Talk about Twitter. There's absolutely no more information available about this - but below are three possible scenarios we can imagine for Google integrating microblogging into its search product.

Real Time Search

The most logical integration of microblogging and search would be microblogging search. Google already indexes Twitter messages, in some ways better than Twitter does. We can imagine "real time" being an option just like web, news, images and blogs on Google search. Here at ReadWriteWeb we use this tool to have that experience already. There is a whole lot that can be done with something like Twitter search if the user accounts tweeting the twits and twats are taken into account. Check out the nascent awesomeness at Twazzup, for example.

This probably isn't going to happen, though, as long as Twitter is the only microblogging game in town. There just isn't a meaningful data set of publicly available status updates elsewhere. Facebook status messages would be great to search but that would contradict the fundamental nature of the site - and Microsoft has a lot of skin in the game there.

We're hoping that open source microblogging technology from Laconi.ca will spread throughout the land and give engines something other than Twitter to search.

Augmenting Pagerank

Inbound links are the primary way that Google determines what's a good page to serve up for any search query. Fresh links from the micro-blogo-o-sphere could well augment the traditional metric with some timeliness.

This is something we explored yesterday in a post about Twitter and how it is not going to index the pages you share links to. It's going to have 3rd party companies perform that function and maybe buy one or more of them.

We don't think Google is going to integrate microblogging in this way though. Why not? Because it would be silly. Google is already fast enough, good enough and doggone it - people like it.

What Are You Doing?

You know what's most likely? That Google will add the equivelant of "what are you doing?" to its search interface. Perhaps "what are you searching for?" Messages posted and available to read through that interface will be to and from your Google Contacts. (That's the people you Gmail with, basically.) Google is making a big push for people to take their Google Profiles more seriously and one consequence of that could be a well populated social graph for users.

Friends could help answer the questions you're asking of Google or they could let you know what they are doing, like a home town version of Google News. If you check out Google Friend Connect, imagining that integrated into search isn't hard at all.

Social search and status sharing. It's a lot less crazy than Google's search wiki.

The paradigm of status sharing and activity streams is just too compelling for Google to stay out of it. Maybe they will buy FriendFeed. Maybe they will build something themselves and maybe it will be good.

Schmidt's hint yesterday only makes sense, though. How can you imagine the integration of microblogging into search looking?

The Schmidt story was found in Brad Williamson's excellent FriendFeed group Media News and Analysis - thanks Brad!

Web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV and RFID are all labeled "transformational" by Gartner, meaning that they are predicted to have a big impact on the market. Microblogging is only ranked "moderate," so Gartner doesn't think that Twitter is a very meaningful technology.

We can't help but feel that Gartner may be underestimating the impact of microblogging. It remarks that services like Twitter enable "new kinds of fast, witty, easy-to assimilate exchanges." Microblogging is rated as having a "moderate" impact on business, however Gartner does not analyze the over-arching trend of Real-time web that microblogging exemplifies. They do make a good point that "channel pollution" is a current issue with these services, however this is where the ecosystem of search and filtering products - around Twitter especially - are proving their worth. See also our post earlier today about the new distributed forms of microblogging that may rise to take Twitter's place over time.

Gartner states that Cloud computing is "changing the way the IT industry looks at user and vendor relationships." It points to vendors such as Amazon.com, Google, Microsoft and salesforce.com.

Regarding eBooks, Gartner has a bob each way: "This technology is potentially revolutionary if the issues that have suppressed adoption are addressed." It lists Amazon.com, Fujitsu, Plastic Logic and Sony as sample vendors.

Gartner's conclusion about RFID is similar to our own - that it's moving slowly. Gartner notes that "the number of leading retailers working with it [RFID] did not grow greatly through 2008 and will not grow significantly during the next two years."

On Web 2.0, Gartner archly notes that "the Web 2.0 hype has peaked as constituencies vie for the next generation of the Web." However it also puts Web 2.0 in the "early mainstream" and is bullish on its future. Note: we reviewed the latest attempt at the next buzzword, Web squared, last week.

Overall, this report is an interesting high level view of the state of technology. It's quite business focused though, so Gartner perhaps overlooks some of the more exciting new consumer Web trends that we've been writing about this year on ReadWriteWeb: real-time Web, Internet of Things, mobile web, to name a few.

Shouts and Whispers

Rejaw differentiates between sending out 'shouts,' which go out to all of your followers as well as the public timeline, and 'whispers,' which are direct and private messages.

At the bottom of the page, you can always see if there are any new 'shouts' or 'whispers' and clicking on those links will take you directly to the appropriate pages.

As is to be expected, every conversation on Rejaw also gets its own permalink and Rejaw also provides RSS feeds for all conversations.

Payloads

One very cool aspect of Rejaw is that you can just post links to images (we tested this with jpg and png files), YouTube and Google videos, as well as mp3 and flv files into your posts and they will immediately appear in a mediaplayer in your timeline. The team behind Rejaw is also responsible for Lingr, which uses the same technology at the back-end.

API

Right from the start, Rejaw offers an API to developers who want to integrate the service into their own tools.

Verdict

So how does Rejaw stack up against Twitter and its brethren? In trying out the service for a while this morning, we really enjoyed the immediate interaction with others on the site. We only noticed one minor bug with regards to deleting already posted messages on the site, but otherwise, the service feels extremely well thought out already and we didn't experience any other issues in our tests. We especially liked how easy it was to embed videos, pictures, and audio into the posts and comments.

If you would like to add me to your friends on Rejaw, you can find my profile here.

Dailyplaces is a location-based microblogging tool, offered as both an iPhone app and a website, that allows its users to create short posts centered around their location.

The thing we like about Dailyplaces is that it focuses on the importance of time and location in mobile microblogging. While Twitter offers geolocational data from both third-party clients and its website, it remains a sort of after-thought. Gowalla and Foursquare allow users to do things like create locations and add pictures and comments, but the focus remains on checking in.

Dailyplaces, on the other hand, focuses on organizing content by time and place. You can browse posts according to their relation to your location and when they were posted. Much like microblogging site Posterous, each user is given a personal page, such as my own at rwwmike.dailyplaces.net, which shows profile information, basic stats and a list of recent posts with an accompanying map.

The iPhone app lets you view posts according to who created them, when they were created and where they were created in relation to where you are. Creating a new post is as simple as tapping a button, snapping a picture and entering some text. The service can also integrate your Twitter account, posting a tweet whenever you post to Dailyplaces.

While Dailyplaces doesn't look to be the end-all of location-based microblogging, it's on the right track. We can expect to see a lot more services like this being used to create content for mobile endeavors, such as touring bands, traveling acts and even just friends on road trips that want to share their experiences. We would love to see a bit more functionality in grouping together posts, either by theme or by trip, and while the iPhone does have a camera, we're not sure that a picture should be required of each and every post. Do we really want to post pictures of black nothingness if we decide to use the service at night?

Many new services struggle to build a developer community around their platform. By being compatible with Twitter, though, Identi.ca's developer pool is now virtually identical with Twitter's developer community, which means that it is only a matter of time before Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, or TweetBox will make posting to Identi.ca an option.

As Twitter is making it more and more difficult for some third-party developers to hook into its API by severely restricting the number of calls any given application can make within a certain time period, Identi.ca will probably see a lot more interest from developers in the near future.

1. Define Your Object: This is the easy part, but perhaps most important. The social object will be the center of your network. On eBay, it's whatever item you're selling or buying. On Amazon, it's a product. On Flickr, it's a photo and so on. 
2. Define Your Verbs: This means what do you want people to do with your social object. Do you want them to comment? Rate it? Share it? Watch it? Etc. Make sure whatever action they should take is clear and highly visible on the site.
3. Make the Objects Shareable: This is almost a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many sites have not made it easy (or even possible!) to share the object which their site is centered around.
4. Turn Invitations into Gifts: Want your friends to join you on the network? Don't just spam them with an invite, send them something of value. Jyri mentioned how a purchase of a Skype headset years ago also included a set for a friend. Also, PayPal had originally offered a small amount of money posted to the account of your friends who signed up for the service.
5. Charge the Publishers, Not the Spectators: On any network, there are those who are creating and those who are passively consuming the content. You shouldn't charge the latter, only the former. The people who are actively using the service and are getting value from it in some way are the ones who would be willing to pay for additional features or, in some cases, just to use the service itself.

An interesting parallel to #5 is the online news industry. Today, many publishers are tossing around ideas about charging for their online content. This actually goes against his final key principal, which may be why some of those ventures won't be as successful as the publishers hope.

Although Jyri Engestrom has not published the slideshow that he used during the presentation, the one embedded below has many of the exact same slides, including the five principles. However, you may be surprised to learn that this one was uploaded to Slideshare two years ago. Even though, it seems the subject matter is still as relevant today as it was back then.

Do you agree that these principles have held up over time? Or does this list need to be modified or changed in some way?

What's even better is that you can click on the notification in the Activity Stream to see all the relevant details. If the item was an image, for example, you can preview it or download the original. For blog posts and wiki pages, you can click to read the item that was updated. Plus, you can download any files that have been added straight from the Activity Stream to your desktop.

However, the cyn.in desktop client isn't just about automated notifications - it allows for those personal updates, too. But this is the enterprise, mind you, so we're not calling them "tweets" here - they are "status updates" instead. Guided by the prompt "What are you doing?" anyone can quickly set their status update which is then sent into the Activity Stream to update everyone else.

Taking a page from Jaiku's book, the client also includes a threaded discussions feature. Any item in the stream can be commented on whether it's an automated update or a personal status update. The replies can be viewed in a pop-up sidebar to the right of the original Activity Stream, just as with photos, wikis, and blog updates. Like FriendFeed, when someone comments on an item, that item bubbles up to the top so everyone is immediately alerted.

As any Twitter user could tell you, no microblogging product would be complete without search, and cyn.in is no exception. When you need to find something that had been posted before and has since fallen off the page, you can enter in a query straight into the desktop client itself. The results returned are ranked for you according to the percentage match and you can scroll through them just as you can with the Activity Stream.

The cyn.in client is beautiful implementation of how microblogging could (and perhaps should) work for businesses, but it's the client's integration with the cyn.in team collaboration suite that makes it so worthwhile. Of course, the decision to move away from your company's current collaboration suite is not one to be made lightly, so you should review the suite's features before deciding if it's right for you.

Other enterprise microblogging clients include Yammer, Present.ly, and Status, but none offer an integrated collaboration suite, too. Cyn.in is open source, but it can also be purchased as a hosted service or as an enterprise appliance.

The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge.

Length

Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention - it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from Wordpress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters - call it "microblogging mode". I don't think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation.

Real Time

While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days.

Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging.

The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that's faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It's an open standard called PubSubHub and it's supported by both Blogger, Wordpress, Buzz and countless other smaller services.

Blogs are already real time.

Identified Subscriptions

One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count.

Why couldn't we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user's own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header.

Addressability

This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, "Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy" and I will get it in my message stream.

Blogs can't do that right?

Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability - using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references.

The only problem with this model is that it's not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don't understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly.

So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber?

To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of "@", they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user's microblogging site.

Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world's open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL.

The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items.

Clients

Why can't existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site - anywhere.

The Future

As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well.

There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way.]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microblogging_vs_blogging_5_ways_to_create_an_open_twitter_alternative.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/microblogging_vs_blogging_5_ways_to_create_an_open_twitter_alternative.php Twitter Tue, 13 Apr 2010 14:35:00 -0800 Guest Author New Google recruits learn how to protect their web applications against security threads with the help of technical presentations and interactive tutorials. Today, Google is making its "Web Application Exploits and Defenses" tutorial available to everybody on the Internet. Part of this tutorial includes Jarlsberg, a full-featured microblogging application that was developed with a single purpose: to be hacked.

Jarlsberg's source code is published under the Creative Commons license and the tutorial is part of Google's Code University.

It Takes a Hacker to Catch a Hacker

As Google's Bruce Leban notes, "it takes a hacker to catch a hacker" and the tutorial is meant to teach programmers to think like an attacker and to learn how hackers find security vulnerabilities. Leban also points out that the security bugs in the application are very typical bugs and similar to those found in many applications today.