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.

BuddyBuilder goes open source

Dave Winer asks for an Open Source twitter.

The world is welcome to the code which I created BuddyBuilder with.

I originally made it so I could blog to everybuddy.org with my IM client. 676 people have registered. A few use it regularly. I don’t actively develop it, but I could start again.

I wasn’t planning on it being an Open Source so I need to tidy up some hard coded stuff. Then it’s yours. You’ll need an XMPP/Jabber server with transports to run it, but that’s easy to do or find. I have it working with AIM, Yahoo and GoogleTalk

You can get weather by IMing mybuddybuilder, and typing weather:90210

You can subscribe to users and tags. It’s a little rough, but easily smoothed out.

Sending mobile text messages from your Instant Messenger

I’ve posted another hack I contributed to O’Reilly’s “PHP Hack”.

Sending mobile text messages from your Instant Messenger

I know Twitter is getting a lot of attention. I’ve been blogging from IM to everybuddy for years with BuddyBuilder.

I’ve decided to relaunch the project and make it open source. This should be interesting. OPML upload, River of news style rss aggregation will be key features of the relaunch.

Google Talk/AIM integration is no technical hurdle

Steve Rubel ponders whether the fact that GoogleTalk and AIM don’t yet interoperate is a technical hurdle.

He’s definitely right in guessing it’s not technical.

Jabber developers have had transports between Jabber and AIM for years now and GoogleTalk is built upon the Jabber protocol.

While it’s certainly not that simple when your dealing with size of the AIM/GoogleTalk user base, it also shouldn’t be that hard.

The Golden Fleece

I’m hoping part two of the latest Gillmor Gang will prove more interesting.

If you remember the Jason and the Argonauts tale, you might know how Jason succeeded in conquest over the Seed men by casting a stone at one, who thought it was his neighbor, and letting them all kill each other.

That’s what Steve Gillmor seems to do by letting the fellas discuss the importance of Google algorithms and whether site owners can get a cut by having search engines bid for their site search.

If Steve would have put the “knockoff” Cheerios down for a sec I know what he would have said.

It’s not whether Google’s algorithms hold up, it’s whether they can garner more stock in the conversation with all their attention data.

The winners of the future are not the best technologies. We’ll all be able to plug into those the same way we plug into an electrical outlet.

The winners are the services which add value to the conversations happening throughout distributed web networks.

These networks and conversations are fluid and changing constantly in response to our gestures.

Those who don’t get this are either thinking too hard or just not enough.

In a similar way that facial and hand gestures are a meaningful supplement to spoken conversations, the gestures which we talk about with attention are the metadata of the conversations happening on the web.

That equates to economic power because markets are conversations.

I agree with Jason Calacanis that many in the SEO business are trying to game this system, but I disagree when he says the system works. People are trying to game the system because it does not work. It just works better than the previous systems.

I can prove it Jason. I’ll write a better piece on a new cell phone than Engadget and see which shows up higher on Google.

No. Those dynamics are only part of the game.

The richer system envelops us with answers using our data and our network’s data in a chameleon like fashion, never static like Google. That’s child’s play.

Jason(Argonaut) succeeded in getting the Golden Fleece but was fickle and left Medea for another Princess.

Likewise, in the shorter term companies may succeed by amassing link attention.

The true winners won’t be seeking the Golden Fleece at all. They will be removing the barriers and letting the crystal waters flow in, filtered and clean, Pure Conversation.

Governments need to join GestureBank

The Human Rights Amnesty report claims the war on terror is draining attention from other issues.
Perhaps the governments of the world need to join GestureBank. They gotta be in it to win it.
Then, apply a filter based upon the anonymous pool of attention metadata and figure this all out.

There are some important discussions happening this week about open formats for attention metadata.
ET better phone home because the clock is ticking on everybuddy. The “Duh” Vinci code is unraveling.

I’m closing comments soon. My contact info is mobile:203.219.5159 email:mattatglistndotcom IM:mterenzio@gmail

Attention musings ghost from last Halloween

I stumbled across a document from Oct. 31, 2005. I don’t remember writing it, and I’m not sure where I was going, but here it is, in it’s less than half baked form:

Peer to Peer social networking is the greatest threat and opportunity facing media companies today.
The ultimate landing point for web information distribution and the conversation marketplace is a converged Instant and Stored messaging and conferencing platform which allows asyncrhronous filesharing.
Ton Zijstra points out that , “ a good way to build strategies that do work in information abundance, is t taking the social context of information into account.”
In this user-centric web, we take the social context of information and provide the most direct path to that information. All unnecessary intermediaries will be removed.

I am pursuing attention.xml as a tool for group moderation. One possible implementation is a group of individuals agreeing that a tagspace be used for a specific purpose and a common attention.xml be used to moderate that space, in either a standalone fashion or by merging it with one’s own attention.xml.

I kinda like what I was getting at, though I’d probably replace Attention.xml with OPML or Glists-reading lists(I can feel the RDF guys cringe)

Here is a link to Ton post I must have been reading.

This certainly gets the Alex Barnett bonus tag: whathehellisallthisabout

My GestureBank donor card

GestureBank, as many of you have probably heard is an interesting new project being evangelized by Steve Gillmor.
I’m contributing my clickstream as of moments ago. Still not sure how the recorder can contribute to Root.net as well. I’ll have to take a second look at that.
Where all of this will take us, we shall see.
My guess: The way GTalk’s jabber based open architecture will slowly melt down the IM silos, projects like GestureBank will melt down the silos of marketing data.
I don’t even think Steve fully realizes what potential that holds for individuals of the world.
This will spawn unforseen applications and networks,. I even have a few in mind already. ; )

RSS 3.0 Roadmap

Update: I was just BSing below but should Instant Outlining be an open protocol to provide “in-band” communication, or am I nuts?
* * *
I think it would be interesting to do what Dave Winer says and call it “Molecule”, just to see what people have in mind to make the spec better. It may never get adopted but it would still be interesting.

Some would just want to clarify the existing spec.
Some would want to create another Atom.

I might like to see a better “communications enclosure” element like:

<comm type="AIM">buddybuilder</comm>
<comm type = "skype. . .
<comm type="


We know we need better identity. In fact, let’s just scrap the old systems and build a mail/IM system right into RSS + SSE.

Who’s with me?

I’m sure something is cooking over at microformats.

Is Web 2.0 ending or beginning?

I’ll combine two posts about two big companies and wonder what they mean about innovation on the web.

First, as many have probably heard, Google has launched the Page Creator.
Meanwhile, the management at my company is asking whether we should be building and hosting sites for our advertisers (local businesses).
Between blogs and three dollar a month web hosting, anyone who wants a site should and can have one.
Helping and educating these potential users is a great idea, but all significant services today are those that enable communication (IM, email, blogging tools, newsreaders, social networks, phot-sharing etc.)
So building a static site for an advertiser is not really helping them, but us.
The better strategy is to work with them to see how we can enable them to communicate with their customers. That is what is replacing advertising, and quickly.
The Google launch makes me think we are running out of innovative ideas for this round and will just work on growing the big ones that have emerged. (memetrackers, mashups, structured blogging, voip etc.)

Second, I see Yahoo has launched the PHP Developer Center.
With the poularity of PHP, this is a pretty big deal and can lead to some great projects.
So, here I think innovation may just be beginning.