Scripting News for 5/8/2008

Coming soooooon 

We’re working to build a scalable, beautiful new TwitterGram, an application built on the super-powerful SwitchAbit platform.

Comments in Twitter? 

I just posted a Tweet: “After seeing comments blossom in FriendFeed, it seems either Twitter should have comments, or extend the API so someone else can add them.”

Why?

1. People still reply to tweets, expecting a response in a tweet. It’s noise to most of my followers. They send responses (to me) asking what am I responding to. If I answer that, then other people ask what I’m responding to in explaining the other person’s response. Twitter is not symmetric, that’s a good feature, but it makes for a shitty conversation medium, imho.

2. Far more people use Twitter than use FriendFeed. Yes, I think it’s great there are APIs and that makes it possible for FriendFeed to build on what Twitter does. But it is a competitive market and ideas should slosh around among all the products.

3. The length of this post should provide a clue why comments would be good in Twitter. I started writing #1 in Twitter itself, and went over 140 chars before I had expressed a single idea.

Testing Pownce public downloads 

I just uploaded a song I recorded on Tuesday to Pownce. After two tries, it worked. You have to be logged in to download the song but anyone can play it. Hmmm. That removes one potential application I had in mind, Pownce as a podcast-serving platform.

Here’s a screen shot of the post.

Anyone should be able to listen to the song even if they’re not a member of Pownce.

Screen shot of the prefs page for public/not public.

Update: Sometime after it was uploaded it stopped working, people were unable to download the song. Obviously there are still some glitches to work out.

Pownce becomes more useful 

Twitter is still my mainstay in microblogging, but I’m using FriendFeed more, and today Pownce removed an important limit that will make it useful in a way that neither Twitter or FriendFeed are. And because all three have APIs and excellent support for RSS, the chances to combine their strengths makes it possible for each to specialize.

Where Pownce is developing strength is in the area of payloads, but until today they were limited to members of Pownce and for non-pro users, to friends of the uploaders. Now it’s possible to upload files that can be downloaded by anyone. The size limit for payloads used to be 10MB, now it’s 100MB, and for pro users 250MB. Interesting new applications should be possible, making it competitive with services such as YouTube and blip.tv, and because it has an API it’s possible to develop applications with Pownce that are not possible with other services.

Is MySpace opening? 

This post on TechCrunch started a bit of discussion.

Ben Metcalfe posted an interesting video comment there, embedded below.