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.

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. ; )

Chatting the way to pure conversation

I remind readers occasionally that this blog started on the premise that what I call “pure conversation” would eventually supplant the current “publish” model of the web.
Today, I think I saw another step toward this end when I used Gmail chat to contact James Corbett to talk about an International Reading List Community. In case you haven’t seen, he’s on the way to something like that here.
The addition of IM presence directly into an email application is a subtle yet extremely powerful too.
I immediately see great power in jumping right into chat for immediate “tight knit” conversation.
This will take root and change communications in business, and this will all happen in the next two years.
I can’t believe that this will be slow in adoption. Update:. . .but I’ve been wrong before.

Steve Gillmor doesn’t need Windows

I listened to the latest Gillmor Daily podcast today while walking with Satch.
I agree with so much of what Steve says, it’s important to note when I think he’s nuts.
While I agree we are moving to a world where the Desktop doesn’t matter as much, it seems crazy for Steve to make little of the leverage that the installed Windows base gives Microsoft.
Does it mean Microsoft will win Steve? (whatever that means)
No, and maybe they didn’t invent the distributed model, but you can’t tell me there are no advantages to owning the desktop.
I’ll give you one. Most people can’t help but think of Microsoft just by powering up their computer. That’s revs pretty high on the “Attention” meter.
Steve then goes on to make a big deal of GTalk as a new type of platform.
Of course he forgets to mention it only runs on Windows.
It interops with Jabber. That’s great. The others will have to open up eventually becaus ethey broke that open. I agree here.
So, the conclusion is that Microsoft needs to change in order to prosper in years to come.
It’s like that old Bud and Lou skit. (and Lon Chaney Jr.)
“tonight, I’ll turn into a wolf.”
“yeah, you and 20 million other guys.”
Everyone is being forced to change.
So they need to embrace open protocols like everyone else.
So, would you rather have to get millions of users to download your new “open” platform , or just include it in your next shipment or upgrade.
We all use the desktop less, Steve contends.
True. But he used it to produce that Podcast(on an Apple with Audacity, no doubt). He needed get at local memory somehow.
It’ll be years and years before bandwidth and remote horsepower oust Microsoft or an open OS from being in most people’s face. Maybe part of the change is opening Windows up in the future.
They need to change. You might say they need to change now. But you could also argue they have some time.

Google XMPP Federation live

Good News for Jabber users. Google Talk has joined the party.

http://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html