[sf-lug] any opinions or thoughts on identi.ca?

[Kai Chang]

Oh I meant just moved to sf from virginia ;). Just graduated from uva
and looking for web development work.  Majored in physics, but pretty
much nil in the career options there.

Twitter's most important change is that you own your tweets, though
obviously they have the right to redistribute.  it's easy to scoff at
this, from a foss perspective, but they are playing an active role in
what is emerging as a very powerful medium.  My comedian friends now
own their jokes, which is enough for most people for 140 chars.

In a very short time though, twitter has short-circuited a lot of
layers of social media.  My grandmas and aunts even read my tweets.
Tweets came close to undermining traditional media in iran.  Twitter
improves the ease with which information passes through the world, and
will help set the groundwork for many publics just finding their
collective voice in the digital age.

For fossies, this revolutionary potential isn't very exciting because
we understand the structure of the internet to be information which
can also be freed.  But twitter's a great stepping stone and as I
said, theyir api is fantastic.  I regularly turn web hobbyist friends
into quasi-competent PHP-hackers due to twitter.  I personally would
rather see a more robust api than source, which is what they've been
working hard on.

Here's a site I used twitter and tumblr in last week.  Didn't have to
teach anyone a clunky cms cause they just needed to keep using what
they use, how beautiful is that!  No viewing the site in IE yet, not
that I have to tell you all.  Also if anyone knows of a good php
caching tutorial let me know.

http://www.amuseboucheimprov.com

Cheers,
Kai

On 9/12/09, Christian Einfeldt <einfeldt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Kai,
>
> I think that it is really cool that you are posting to our LUG from
> Virginia!  Thanks for joining this list!  May I ask what motivated you to
> join a list for a city 3k miles away on the opposite side of the country?
> Just curious, and please forgive me if I am being too forward in asking.  I
> don't mean to offend.  I just think it is cool that someone from Virginia
> would join our list.  Again, welcome!
>
> On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 3:11 AM, Kai Chang
> <kai.salmon.chang at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I think twitter's api is fantastic quite frankly, and their TOS
>> changes are commendable.
>
>
> Can you give examples?  What do you like about their TOS?
>
>
>> But twitter's all about the massive networking effects
>> and open source alternatives just don't provide that sometimes.
>
>
> Yeah, that is one reason that I started using Identi.ca --> to try to
> increase its reach.
>
> c u
>


-- 
Kai Chang  |  kai.salmon.chang at gmail.com