Reilly Grant » rant

Down With Twitter, Up with Identi.ca

Reilly — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:34:22 +0000

Those who know me are familiar with my general dislike for Facebook. The same reasoning applies to Twitter as well. The fundamental problem with social networking sites is that they are closed communities. Sure, almost everybody is in them, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have to have an account with a particular provider to participate. This isn’t a problem when there is a monopoly, but what if there are two popular services? Years ago this was the case with instant messaging. There were 4 major players, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ. For the most part membership in these networks was regional. Most of the US favored AOL, though there were pockets of MSN usage as well while Europe went for MSN and Yahoo. (Disclaimer, this is based on personal experience and not any scientific study. Such a study would be interesting, I’ll save that for later.) Most people had only one account. If you didn’t you had to either keep multiple client apps running at once, or use one of the multi-IM clients like Trillian.

Today we have the same problem, but it’s actually gotten more complicated. Instant messaging was a relatively simple application and it didn’t take much for the developers of multi-IM software to figure out how to interface with multiple networks at once. Most social networks these days are instead websites. While a web interface makes these sites incredibly easy to access from anywhere (which also explains the rise of Gmail over IMAP/SMTP based mail services) it means that there is no common protocol for communication. That is until Google Wave takes over. Web APIs offered by many of these services help a little, but nothing can beat the push capabilities and vender-neutralness of XMPP.

So we come at last to my issue with Facebook and Twitter. I am generally a very well connected person. When people see me without my laptop I usually get some pretty snarky comments about it. I am always reluctant, however, to make my communication tools more complicated. I have a single email program for long form communications, and an IRC client for chat rooms and instant messaging (through Bitlbee). I use Google Reader to check RSS feeds. (I’ve tried the RSS reader in Thunderbird but it doesn’t work as well.) Personally I think that pretty much covers any form of communication I need.

Why don’t I think Facebook and Twitter deserve my screen real estate? They are both messaging services. Granted, Facebook delivers a lot of extra functionality on top of it, but at the core it is about sending messages. I already have something for sending messages, both to a lot of people (IRC) and to a single person (IM). In fact, Twitter used to support receiving updates over XMPP (Jabber). Now it doesn’t, so I stopped using it.

Enter Identi.ca. On the surface it is exactly the same as Twitter, but with two important differences. First, the platform is open-source. While I personally don’t want to start my own similar service, it is good to know that the code is freely available. Richard Stallman has been making a big fuss about this recently. Second, it supports pushing updates over XMPP (my favorite) as well as SMS and can update your Facebook and Twitter status just so your less fortunate friends can keep up with you too.

Does this mean I’ll join the micro-blogging revolution? Maybe. At least now I’ll be happy about it.

Falling Down the Facebook Well

Reilly — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 02:45:25 +0000

Lately I’ve found myself spending more and more time on Facebook. Probably in an attempt to keep in touch with the people I wish I were seeing more often in real life (or meatspace as some would call it). It makes me feel like a bit of a hypocrite since I’m always talking about how much I hate Facebook and here I am actually updating my status more than once a day. I must admit that it is a good diversion and a way to keep in touch with people, but it won’t replace an actual conversation. Preferably one face to face.

So, if you’re my friend (sorry, I’m not looking for new ones) send me an email, give me a call. If you’re around town, maybe we can hang out. Get me off Facebook and into real life!

On the Dallas Datacenter Raids

Reilly — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 05:11:27 +0000

For those who don’t keep up with this kind of news, on April 2nd the FBI raided a Dallas datacenter seizing most of their equipment without any explanation. (CBS story) This datacenter was a colocation facility, meaning that most of the servers were not owned by Core IP, but by its customers. By seizing this equipment the FBI was taking dozens of innocent businesses offline. Worse yet, with their equipment in custody they were left without the means to continue their business. What sorts of protections do innocent bystanders have from the actions of law enforcement?

Now, I myself have a server in a Dallas datacenter (ThePlanet, thankfully unaffected) and I’d like to assume that someone isn’t going to randomly unplug it and hold it hostage for God knows how long because somebody else with a machine in the same building did something wrong. Yes, I have backups, and so did at least some of the companies affected. That doesn’t help, however, when all your equiptment is gone. This business managed to get their data back, but getting back up and running was completely at their own expense.

It seems like this whole mess came down to a dispute the owner of Core IP was having with AT&T and Verizon about telco fees. Why was the FBI even involved and why was a raid necessary? This seems like the sort of thing that could easily have been handled without confiscating anything. Even so, did the FBI understand that some of the machines they were taking didn’t belong to their target? I guess the take-it-all-and-sort-it-out-later approach is easier, but come on people, are these shock-and-awe tactics really necessary?