On December 1st, 2008 Mark Wubben wrote:
Today saw the acquisition of Pownce by Six Apart. Just like last week's acquisition of Values of n by Twitter, the acquisitions seem to be about the technology and the team, rather than the community. Quite the same can be said for last years acquisition of Jaiku by Google: given the subsequent developments, it has become clear that Google wanted the people, mostly Jyri Engeström and the chops of the mobile team. Similar for the JotSpot acquisition two years ago, though not so for YouTube.
The interesting development here though is that Six Apart and Twitter are upfront about their intentions, and are closing down the services at two weeks notice. Pownce is providing the ability to export your content:
Since we’d like for you to have access to all your Pownce messages, we’ve added an export function. Visit pownce.com/settings/export/ to generate your export file. You can then import your posts to other blogging services such as Vox, TypePad, or WordPress.
Values of n is doing much the same thing:
Can I take my data with me?
But of course! Both Stikkit and I want Sandy provide RSS/Atom and iCalendar feeds of your data that can be downloaded to your computer (and then uploaded to/imported into any other desktop application or online service that supports these same standards.
I want Sandy: Visit http://iwantsandy.com/help/feeds for information on I want Sandy's data feeds.
Stikkit also has a programmatic interface -- the Stikkit API -- that provides more comprehensive access to your data, both directly and through one of the many third-party tools and applications built against it. Visit http://stikkit.com/api#feeds for details.
We will be providing some additional export functionality in the days to come should our users require anything beyond what is provided in these feeds.
While I'm happy to see export features, it must be quite horrible to see your service / community disappear like that. At least Jaiku is still more or less running.
Perhaps we need a Web 2.0 Asylum, for users of now-dead services?
Of course, closing down the services may be a sign of the not-so-encouraging economic times. Without enough revenue to make it worthwhile to keep the services running, it's probably best to shut them down instead.
[acquisition, jotspot, google, twitter, sixapart, pownce, web2.0, downturn]
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On October 21st, 2008 Mark Wubben wrote:
I started using my Twitter account yesterday, after more than two years without any posts and, somewhat surprisingly, 42 followers. Instead of Twitter, I've been using Jaiku a lot. Now, my Jaiku stream is marked private, because when I post to Jaiku, I have a mental picture of who reads the posts. Namely, my Jaiku friends. Because I'm Jaikuing for them, and not the entire world, I keep the stream private.
For now, the Twitter stream is public. Twitter posts are cross-posted to Jaiku, though not the other way around. I hope I can keep the mental distinction between the Twitter stream reaching the entire world, and the Jaiku stream for my friends. (If not, Twitter, too, will become private.)
How do you use Twitter, Jaiku, or various other micro-blogging services? Who do you think you are micro-blogging for?
[twitter, jaiku, micro-blogging, public, private, perception]
[651 comments]
So I have been thinking about yet another thinkpiece - and when Mads posted this morning about real/unreal - I couldn’t help myself starting to write it.
I think what we look at here, is a question between “automatic presence” vs. “real presence”…
Automatic presence is where apps aggregate all your content (basically you can put everything you have in there)… there’s some new lifestreaming stuff coming up as lifestream.fm, ping.fm and identi.ca…
These are good for - if you need to have all your content in one place… and you don’t want to add it all yourself.
the great thing about this is that:
1. as a person it makes a “real” impression of who you are
2. as a company it really makes sense to use this as a form of marketing - it’s great for that..
the bonus is that you don’t need to do anything to be present there.. But they are still aggregators, and in my Point of View aggregation works best if you have something that you also aggregate in your mind.. ( thoughts - putting the best of you out there etc)
Anyway - as I have argued before, these apps are not a community - they are status messages and they show your presence. Nothing more…
now “real presence” is something where you actually need to contribute with something else than your statusmessages and yourself to actually gain whuffie and to be a part of the community..
which is something I preach a lot - you can’t be a real part of a community if you are not present, no matter how many of your RSS feeds you drag into it.
and Whuffie is possibly what we can measure automatic presence vs. real presence in. You don’t get that much Whuffie for automatic presence- unless - I would say, you combine it with real presence…
Real presence = whuffie… real presence + automatic presence = more whuffie… automatic presence: not that much whuffie =)
[aggregation, aggregators, automaticpresence, community, identi.ca, lifestreamfm, pingfm, real, realpresence, RSS, status messages, twitter, unreal, whuffie]
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