All posts tagged microblogging
All posts tagged microblogging
Cyril Doussin posted on Pownce:
I am increasingly frustrated by Twitter’s 140 character limit. It rarely let’s me fully express what I’d like to say. Not that I want to write Bible-like comments, but a couple more sentences would be great sometimes.
So it’s probably time to start using Pownce more frequently, for these personal, not blog article worthy, thoughts.
Link has been added to the bookmark toolbar, iPhone app is installed, let’s see where this takes us over the next few weeks…
http://ben-ward.co.uk/journal/snippets/
— I had a similar thought about Pownce. Though I come at it from the other side. My problem is that my blog has become a place more for longer articles and I don’t want short snippets of ideas end up there.
I pondered getting working on my Tumblr account, but that fell down pretty quick when I realised Pownce has everything Tumblr has, but better, and with social integration and desktop/iPhone tools. For me, it’s much easier to post to Pownce. And whilst I still feel that OEmbed should have built on Atom rather than invent a new vocabulary from scratch, it’s used to excellent effect in posts too.
Which is to say, it’s taken me ages, but I’ve figured out what Pownce is for. ‘Share stuff with your friends’ isn’t the best tagline for it, but really it’s right there at the birth of micro-blogging, which turns out to be a really good idea.
So today people at Yahoo are playing with Yammer — the ‘Twitter clone for business groups’ that won the TechCrunch50 yesterday.
It seems somewhat useful, in that it’s stimulating discussion between people in the company who wouldn’t normally interact, but by the same note, it’s a third party service so no-one should be trusting them to keep confidential information safe.
Something that comes to mind, though, how does Yammer handle removing individuals who leave a company? It seems that once you’re signed up, you’re in the network. Even after you lose the yahoo-inc email address, it just serves as an identifier and so long as you don’t forget the password, you can continue to participate and read the internal discussions of your co-workers. Surely some sort of weekly ‘Click Here to Remain a Network Member’ confirmation email is required, to ensure that people don’t linger around.
You can have admins, but that’s where their business model kicks in. It costs $1 per user per month to have admin functionality for a company. So within companies just using it for free, there’s no options for that sort of thing.
I can’t decide if it’s cool yet. It’s neat, and people are giving it a good try so we’ll see if it sticks. They’ve done well to produce a good suite of features for launch (XMPP, desktop app, BlackBerry app, reply tracking, tags integration), so it’s in pretty good shape. For Y! we hit an issue of sharing corporate secrets with a third party, so there’s a limit to what people will talk about on there (or at least, there should be a limit…). We really need a Twitter clone running behind the firewall for that sort of thing, but building it, as well as the API and supporting applications is difficult to justify.
