Micro blogs are already here

Microblog spec

I read Manton Reece's thoughts on defining a micro blog post which is pretty cool.i think that what hear getting at is a twitter replacement. Recently news broke that Twitter feeds would change from being a chronological list, to a more random algorithm driven feed. Tweets will show up in your feed based on yor interests not the people you follow. This change makes Twitter a much less useful tool for broadcasters and would essentially make Twitter useless for journalists.

We're stuck in this predicament with Twitter because they just need to make money, and We the users, are the product. It's almost surprising that Twitter has taken this long to make clearly money making decisions. This frustrates and unnerves everybody because we don't want to be sold.

We aren't in control of Twitter and we never were. Now we want to be in control. We're in control of our blogs and we never weren't. We want that control with twitter now. And I think that's the point of Manton's post, to replace Twitter.

I think that in order for a micro blog standard to really replace twitter it needs These features:

• Use RSS.
• Free for casual users or paid for power users.
• hosted independently just like blogs.
• Broadcast and Subscribe from the same client.

It wouldn't even be necessary to invent a new protocol, just building an RSS feed aggregator into our blogs, and then truncate the Tweets based on an arbitrary character count. Full blog posts would be truncated and expanded with a tap.

And just like that the whole twitter problem has been solved.

What do you think? Send me an email at me@kow.fm.