DISQUS

Matt Shaulis · 1 year ago

Awesome post... I would add that, as you state: "a strong alternative to Laconi.ca", I consider the entire OMB family to be a strong alternative to Twitter... (in that, whether identi.ca, army.twit.tv, or omb dot com, the federated nature of the protocol they all use makes them interoperable. And these examples really are just surface scratchings to the extent that some really fun tools are sure to come of this (and other related protocols that will enabled interoperability), the best of which we have yet to see, i'm sure! ... possibly even some of the things you elude to in the closing could be huge... ;) ... ) The most fun part is that this is all just getting started... give these federated technologies a little time and they will be blowing the average person away with options and portability freedom they really don't comprehend even now... because nobody really offers it. Anyway, really exciting post, Jesse... thanks for the stats and all the additional info!

Adam Varga · 1 year ago

Interesting post. I have trouble getting excited about a microblogging platform because of its features / technology. I think the real power is in the platform's network, and how easy it is to reach people and have other people reach you.

Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas · 3 months ago

Hi,

I have been a user of identi.ca for a while and when I see the limitations on pdf attachments (that I think are pretty useful for educational microblogging) I thought on running by myself enabling this characteristic (that by the way is just a limitation of the type of attachments in the identi.ca configuration of laconica, not a limitation of laconica by itself). But after seing the installation instructions I think that something easier like OMB would be nicer also. I'm testing it now and I think it has a lot of potential specially because of the microapps, but I can't see any of the characteristics you mention when you say:

"you can also provide links, upload photos, and most impressive, provide tags with your posts. Each Tagged entry gets added in a list of posted tags on the right of OMB".

I have only discovered the attach (that by the way is not very intuituve because it needs to be added _after_ the initial post), but tags, groups, metatags and so on are really hidden.

Thanks for your excellent posts. It helps a lot understanding the trends.

Cheers

brianjesse · 3 months ago

Jesse thanks again for your great coverage of self-hosted microblogging, you'll always be the #1 blogger to me :-)

Vladimir, thanks for your kind words about OpenMicroBlogger :-) It still needs a lot of work but we have fixed more than 100 bugs in the past few months so i'm pretty happy about the way it's going.

If you click on the Admin tab and change your theme to "Prologue" then you will see some of the features Jesse was reporting on. There is a box for pasting a link, and also a box for tags/categories.

You will also find controls in the Admin area to turn Categories/Tags on/off, turn Uploads on/off, etc. These will add some of these features to the more modern "P2" theme.

I hope i've answered your questions, feel free to come by our forum at http://openmicroblogger.org/discuss/ or send me an e-mail brian@megapump.com

Cheers

-- Brian

exador23 · 3 months ago

It should be noted that this post is from September 2008, a couple months after identica opened it's doors to a massive namespace grab & people trying out the latest social media thang. After the initial drop, compete.com shows steady monthly growth of 11% and identica will probably hit the 1 Billion posts milestone within a month or so.It is currently at nearly 100,000 unique visitors: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/identi.ca+open...

brianjesse · 3 months ago

identi.ca competes by being easy to install, it's a lot different from social networks that compete on monthly uniques. apples and oranges.

exador23 · 3 months ago

true. I was just initially shocked to see that graph, and the text of the post, until I figured out these were fresh comments on an old post. :) I think it's great that there are some OMB alternatives to laconica. the real prize is some sort of open microblogging protocol adopted among all services including twitter.