Tag Archives: micromedia

by Brian Solis

Interesting news in the micromedia space today. Just read over at the Pownce Blog that Six Apart has acquired the company and will essentially shut it down – in its current state – on December 15th. Leah Culver and Mike Malone are joining the Six Apart engineering team, most likely to focus on integrating a community infrastructure that ties together the company properties, such as Movable Type, TypePad, and Vox.

In the post, co-founder and developer Leah Culver expressed, “We’re bittersweet about shutting down the service but we believe we’ll come back with something much better in 2009. We love the Pownce community and we will miss you all…We’re very happy that Six Apart wants to invest in growing the vision that we the founders of Pownce believe so strongly in and we’re very excited to take our vision to all of Six Apart’s products.”

Shot at BarCampBlock, Palo Alto

Good luck Leah and Mike! Stay tuned everyone…

UPDATE (email from Pownce to its users):

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15, 2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new pro accounts.

To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.

Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not be accessible after this date.

Please visit our new home to find out more: http://www.sixapart.com/pownce

Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

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Sorry to bother you. I know you guys are working diligently to make Twitter a more productive and active community and working through technical hurdles and scaling issues takes time and perseverance.

I wanted to just ask you a quick question, or, more importantly, encourage you to communicate with us a bit more proactively in regards to what and why, instead of leaving the guesswork, questions, and most likely incorrect answers to your loyal userbase.

My friends on Twitter are important to me as they are to everyone who passionately participates and defines the Twitter community. We lost followers, some of whom may have been spammers, but others are friends. I don’t have the time to go through and reconnect with those who vanished, but I will since they’re important to me. Just let me know if I should start that process or if you’re working on restoring my connections.

Thank you!

UPDATE: Good news, it looks like they’ll be back soon according to the Twitter Status Blog.

by Brian Solis

It’s inevitable. As Twitter experiences growing pains, new entrants will seize the opportunity to provide a more complete and open experience to communicating with and at the people you may or may not know.

The Twitterati are frustrated, worn, and impatient. At this point, any and all alternatives are starting to look attractive. For example, when you’re starving, all food appears appetizing, including the options that you wouldn’t normally consider consuming.

Every now and then however, new applications emerge that offer hope. And with that hope, we also experience confusion, thinning attention, and new communities where interesting conversations transpire between people we know and most likely people we should know – well, and some we shouldn’t.

The latest micromedia/microblogging network to launch is indenti.ca, introduced to us by Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb.

I’m here: http://identi.ca/briansolis

Evan Prodromou, creator of WikiTravel launched Indenti.ca via the CreativeCommons blog and supports CC licenses for the content that flows through the stream.

Identi.ca is built using Open Source, CreativeCommons framework for a distributed network of federated microblogging services according to Kirkpatrick.

Like Twitter, it supports Jabber, except on Identi.ca, it works today. It also provides OpenID support which is a feature every social network should support.

However, the list of things it doesn’t support, even the most basic features such as replies and direct messages, is long and potentially dissuading.

The most important story surrounding Identi.ca, is that the platform for which its hosted is open, meaning that we could place the Laconi.ca software on our server to host a dedicated community of our own.

While Identi.ca is extremely promising, the conversation continues to further fragment, which thins our attention and ultimately impacts the girth of any one community – which isn’t always a bad thing.

With every new service that appears, unless of course, you’re already on FriendFeed, our attention is further segmented and distributed. Since Identi.ca feeds can export into FriendFeed, then we contribute to the aggregation and concentration of focus and activity. FriendFeed though, can resemble a firehouse and depending on who you follow, can overwhelm many – especially those seeking conversations in bursts of 140 characters.

If adoption is any indication, Identi.ca is then incredibly promising. But at the very least, it demonstrates that communities are only as loyal as hosts who support them.

More at:

SheGeeks
Inquisitr
SarahinTampa
ScriptingNews
VentureBeat
MapleLeaf2.0
SeanPercival
ConversationalMediaMarketing
WinExtra

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