Soooo…. I see a lot of twitter action which would look nice in this form.
So I setup twitterfeed to grab my music updates, seeing what they look like on twitter (they look souless). twitterfeed is a not so efficient idea for this, and making a pure twitter integration is purely stupid, since they are ass-warping their API with OAuth and it would end up something only usable with twitter (twitter is not the only platform in the world guys).
Kairu Ishimaru says doing it all on twitter is a good idea, but didn’t give one bit of explanation; thanks for playing.
New papa ghostlightning gave good thoughts/inspiration for twitter-melative gattai, and with a single-update approach. Sadly, tweeting and then having melative eat is a serious problem for a few reasons:
- Private twitter, requires OAuth coding for twitter API
- No filtering on a user’s own status pool (when fetching updates)
- It’s not real-time
- Parsing a non-contextual message is 1000% more difficult than creating a non-contextual message from one of melative’s stream items.
- melative is upstream of twitter. twitter is an end-point; nothing ends up on twitter and then some other microblog (ie. blog post -> twitterfeed -> twitter, not the reverse ).
Anyway, Ping.fm is where it’s heading! (because their API is impartial to service) What this means is that posting into the melative stream will ultimately enable a post straight through to ping.fm for a given user’s api key (and the ping account can be setup to post wherever from there).
It’s the best option so far. Also, because melative now uses a single-field status (like all other microblogs), this opens the ability for existing 3rd party applications (ie. all those lovely and bloatacious Air apps) to work on melative. In the meantime, the current Firefox extension exists [and will be update shortly to compensate for this new single-field update].
Sorry for the rehashing… NEXT POST WILL BE ON ANIMU!
Notes
The main difference between melative’s actionblog and the plethora of current microblogs is that a given specific message format is treated as an action (/listening /music/Phantasia/Infinite Mirror. bla bla bla message). This turns the microblog into almost an irc/command-like interface.
The second big difference is that those actions are subtracted from the actual message (/listening /music/Phantasia/Infinite Mirror. <- this would be taken out of the message content). Thus, status messages are shortened, when the context is taken out.
Without a context-topic/target, it functions nearly the same as any other microblog (with some other features: html, visibility modifiers[hawt], etc).
Good lord, ping.fm looks like a monster! I can update it via twhirl too! If I can actually update melative and twitter simultaneously through ping.fm from my twhirl app… then I’m solid gold.
Good rehash Ryan. Nice and clear. *shudders with joy* Ooo baby I love using melative.
I feel ashamed for not explaining why Twitter is a good microblogging idea. ;__;
@ghostlightning it’s actually a great connecting point, and it’s main purpose is simply passing these micro-messages around.
twhirl does support updating to ping.fm, which is rad, but I think it’s a one-way kind of street. (I don’t think ping.fm can show a list of friends’ updates on the various services… not sure any service can show all the updates from everywhere, not without the other users being there).
Though, you can have multiple twhirl updaters open, post to one, it appears on another, but still fully be able to use twhirl-twitter for @ replies, etc.
So yea, a good option would be getting twhirl integration for updating melative, which is pretty simple. See melative needs to be at the head because of the /action message format and html stripping. Otherwise the messages on other services will look quite strange (play with the new melative stream and you’ll see what I mean). You wouldn’t want all the action overhead sent to other services, so unless twhirl or ping.fm will do some translating from contextual to non-contextual (which I’d fully support) melative at the helm is solid.
It’s ultimately easier to let melative translate the message into a non-contextual format (which could possibly be user-defined), but going the other way (posting #TitleWithNoSpacesOrMedia EP: message) is a bad option, linguistically; it would take more time to get it right than to make the service better.
[okay that was alot >_>]
Personally, I don’t use twhirl, simply because it takes up 65+ MB of ram, where a firefox extension adds on maybe 8-10 MB. ATM, my Firefox is using 118MB of RAM with mstream and twitterfox extensions enabled. I started twhirl, it’s using 76MB … the cost/benefit just isn’t there. Also, don’t most ppl have firefox and twhirl open together anyway O.o? (another survey question I think would be interesting)
@mellow_bunny, whooosh! You know what I’m saying /highfives, you’ve seen the /action format, and all that jazz. One thing I might change is the message length on melative, bringing it down to make it a better fit (still doesn’t bother contextual targets, html, etc).
Also, what I’m thinking is this:
/listening /mu/Mean Everthing To Nothing/. I’m standing on the table singing! !pingfm
That !pingfm trigger would make it hit the user’s ping account, if they have it setup. Plus it’s subtracted from the msg.
@Kairu Ishimaru
lol, well, it would be advantageous to provide even a few words. Looking at Ping.fm’s list you can see how many services are there for various reasons. melative, while it can be used for I’m eating breakfast type updates, it’s true shine comes in life of Media (supporting 15 various types atm including anime, manga, light noves, visual novels, and video games, and tv, and literature, and blogs, and periodicals, film, music etc)…
ghostlighting mentioned that melative is covering too much, but it’s mainly media… all media (and the creators/characters of it)… the centerpiece is not food, places, businesses, etc. The benefit comes from handling and containing media experiences and interaction in a fluid system (imagine wikipedia, minus all non-media related articles, and add in the social experience, friends, scrobbling, tagging, rating, viewing list, etc).
So yea.. twitter is for microblogging, melative is for a whole bunch of other activity (but the interface is now in a microblog-format… you can add stuff to your experience list, recommend titles, rate titles from the microblog, get it?) … it just works for every type of media out there.