TinyURL is dead. . .
It’s no big revelation that file-sharing is a popular online activity and the ways to do it are countless and evolving.
Email attachments, P2P services and vertical silos like YouTube rank among the heavy hitters.
Twitter users don’t have a built in way to share files. They generally put the media object somewhere on the web and point a TinyURL at it.
It has been suggested that we could embed metadata into the TinyURL. This metadata will tell a user the destination when they scroll over a link. Maybe we could also embed mime-types into the links to show us the fact that a link is to a video, photo or other media object.
Many folks, including Dave Winer, have worked to make the process of sharing media on Twitter more integrated. By creating third party services that sit on top of Twitter and its API, photo and other sharing has become more accessible.
A purist like Steve Gillmor might say this effort is unnecessary and the TinyURLs work just fine. On the other hand, Gillmor might point to LiveMesh, a Twitter-like service, but juiced up to handle not only our text-flows, but our media-flows as well. I’m sure Steve will tell me how I misinterpreted him on the next Newsgang call. ; )
Now, there is a lot of talk about XMPP being an important part of the “Social Network Backbone” and I couldn’t agree more.
Let me quote myself from October, 2005, the day this blog was created:
I no longer believe in the web. . .
So what do I believe in? Instant Messaging. Once we add social network and RSS features to IM applications, this will be the only platform we will ever need. At that point, we will emerged from the wormhole we are now traveling in.
I firmly believed we have almost arrived there with Twitter. The question remains how and where the ancillary features are implemented and/or integrated.
If you look up the archives of the Jabber/XMPP developer mailing lists you’ll see the conversation of in-band and out-of-band file-sharing has been a hot one for years.
File-sharing over IM already has legs, but as the IM protocols become more and more intertwined with our social graph we can expect that the “IM attachment” will become bigger than the inter-office email attachment. . .
Or will it just be a TinyURL?
P.S. Look at GMail to see how far ahead Google is integrating IM and filesharing.