Recently, the Twitter clone identi.ca launched. Identi.ca interests me more than the microblogging services Jaiku, Pownce, or Plurk because identi.ca is open source.

Of course, identi.ca has gotten some criticism. At the time of this writing, identi.ca is shockingly featureless. There are also some minor bugs, and it appears to be unstable at times. I have seen PHP errors on the page, timeouts, and identi.ca messages (informally called by the community as dents) not appearing. Identi.ca supporters counter that identi.ca was released early and it is expected to have problems.

But this raises an interesting question. Should a microblogging service open up to the public when it has few features, or when it is fully polished? Open source applications traditionally allow input from the community at a very early stage. But when a product is released to the public, it generates a lot of buzz, which is useful in getting people to use the product. This buzz can go away when people get bored of talking about the product, and it is possible that potential users could become uninterested with the service and not come back when it has new features and bugfixes.

Of course, a lot of open source applications can still be open to the public early and generate the most buzz at the right time. Firefox is one example of this. Even though many people had tried out the Firefox 3 alphas, betas, and release candidates, Firefox still got a lot of buzz during Download Day.

But the thing about Firefox 3 and Download Day was that Firefox generated a lot of buzz by attempting to go for a world record. Attempting something like that is much more difficult for smaller organizations.

But so far, I seem to have overlooked an option. I have only mentioned going public early or staying completely private until the service is, for the lack of a better term, done. There is always the option of the invite-only phase. In this situation, the user base grows as people invite others, but the growth is slower as people have to be able to obtain an invite to be able to use the application. Invite-only testing also gives more control over how many users join, because the application developers control the invites. This means that the growth of the userbase can be slowed or even stopped should scaling problems appear.

Also, I’ll note that in my idea of an invite-only microblogging service, anybody can view the messages of a user, but only those with invites can register accounts and post replies.

Below are the advantages and disadvantages of going public from the start, staying private until the product is finished, and

Going public from the start

Advantages:

• You have more eyes looking out for bugs.
• You have more time to build a community, which is a big part with Twitter clones.

Disadvantages:

• If you are not careful about how you market it, people could see your service as uninteresting as people have already talked about it.
• The community might not come if your service doesn’t have necessary features or is buggy when they tried it.

Staying private until the application is polished

Advantages:

• The application is abundant with features.
• The developers have the ability to radically change the service without worries. There are no users to be affected by the changes.
• If the application is tested properly, bugs are caught quickly and before the bugs annoy any users.

Disadvantages:

• The developers cannot listen to the wishes of the users. This means that time might accidentally be spent on features that the users do not think are completely necessary.
• Usability testing is limited to very few people.

Going with an invite-only testing phase

Advantages:

• Control over the growth of the user base.
• Hype as not everybody can get a first-hand look at the service.
• Benefits involving the community without the negatives of going public early.

Disadvantages:

• Microblogging generally works well when you have a large community. Having a small community reduces the use of microblogging as fewer people can respond to a user. Because of this, the user is given more incentive to invite other people to contribute to the discussion.

Conclusion

None of these paths for microblogging services are perfect. I say that it depends on the developers. If there is a clear plan for marketing the service, going public from the start looks like a good choice. If the developers think it is best to gradually increase the userbase to test see if the application scales up properly, invite-only seems like a good option. If the developers want a grand opening, or some other better reason, staying private until a later stage might work for them.

The FriendFeed API is far from perfect, but what’s making me love it is NoiseRiver. So, who is behind this masterpiece of an API application? directeur on FriendFeed is responsible for this masterpiece of an API application.

So, what do I like about it? First off, the user interface is excellent. It takes the simplicity of FriendFeed’s user interface and entwines it with an elegance that is so hard to achieve when building a good user interface. Click on the below thumbnail to see the screenshot full-size.

Now, it does more than serve up a pretty user interface. It actually solves some of FriendFeed’s most basic problems. What does it solve?

Well, several people have talked how noisy FriendFeed users can drown out the posts of less-frequent FriendFeed users. Now, if you like the posts of the noisy and quiet FriendFeed users, you’re at a bit of a disadvantage. It’s more difficult to hear the quiet FriendFeed users, and there may be some cases when you’re more interested in what the quiet users have to say.

NoiseRiver to the rescue! It allows you to select which users you like more than others.

Okay, but the noisy FriendFeed users might also talk about topics that you aren’t interested in or don’t like at all. What do you do about that?

No problem. NoiseRiver solves this problem by allowing you to insert keywords and rate those too.

Now, I might really like NoiseRiver, but you are annoyed with something in NoiseRiver’s user interface. What do you do?

Wel, there’s the NoiseRiver FriendFeed room where you can post suggestions, and a lot of the suggestions are acted upon immediately.

In conclusion, NoiseRiver is a top-notch web application that has a great user interface and solves some of FriendFeed’s problems.

For some additional reading, you can check out Louis Gray’s coverage of NoiseRiver.

UPDATE: Apparently some people think that NoiseRiver actually has a chance of being acquired.

• KDevelop
• Mousepad
• Gedit
• More coming soon

This part in the series will cover Geany, a lightweight editor for Linux. It uses GTK+. Geany, unlike KDevelop, doesn’t take a long time to load, but packs a lot of features. As shown below, we will be covering Geany 0.13.

When you start it up, you get something that looks like what you have below. Click to see a bigger verson.

At the bottom, you have a panel that gives status messages, a compiler, compiler messages, a scratch pad, and a terminal.

To edit Geany’s templates or syntax highlighting, you have to edit certain configuration files. Below is what editing a file looks like by default. Pictured below is a file from the “All In One SEO Pack” WordPress plugin.

The folks that make Geany are really, really dedicated to open source. They assume that you feel the same way. By default, Geany’s templates contain the GPL. You can’t really see it in the thumbnail, so click on the image to see it full-size.

What I didn’t mention is that Geany also has a Windows version, so you can use your editor on more than one platform too.

In conclusion, Geany is a lightweight, fast, and featureful editor. This is a good choice if you’re not a KDE fan or want something that can run on Windows too.

My conclusion? While Flock is totally cool, I still don’t get it. First, I’ll go over the brilliance of Firefox, and then write how Flock deviates from that.

See, the best thing about Firefox is that you have the basic features that can get you around the Internet easily, but if you are desiring more functionality, it’s most often only an extension away. You don’t have features that you aren’t going to use. The user interface isn’t filled with all sorts of complicated buttons unless you chose to add those buttons.

Flock includes a lot of functionality from the start. It integrates with many of the most popular web services, like Twitter and Digg, which I like. But there are services that I don’t use, like the blog editor. I prefer the WordPress 2.5 interface.

Now, remember how I mentioned about how Firefox’s interface isn’t filled with all sorts of complicated buttons unless you add them. By default, Flock has the below buttons next to the bookmarks.

Now, it feels like more work to remove things you don’t need than it is to add things that you do need. At least, that’s what I think.

So, Flock has features that I don’t need, and the user interface has buttons that control those features that I don’t need.

So, in conclusion, is Flock my browser of choice? Nope. Is Flock a cool browser with a lot of functionality built into it? Yes. Does Flock have a promising future? Yes. Are there people out there that could put Flock to good use? You can bet on it. While Flock doesn’t follow Firefox’s principles of simplicity and adding functionality via extensions, it is a very cool browser.

• Seeing the activity from many web services all in one place.
• Discovering new content.

You could argue that FriendFeed is also for discussion, but I think that the two that I listed above are a bit more important.

When you put all sorts of information in one place, as well as allow the user to discover new content, you can end up with way too much noise all in one place. I’ve written about FriendFeed’s noise before, and said that some people don’t believe that the noise is all bad. But you have to keep in mind that FriendFeed is still an early adopter thing, and early adopters don’t mind noise as much as the average person. It takes a while to wade through all the noise and find something useful. The average person wants to quickly know what is going on in the world.

Traditional media caters to this. You can glance at a set of headlines in a newspaper and get a basic idea of what happened in the world. You can turn on the TV to see reporters give you the news. But FriendFeed doesn’t make it that easy. You have to find the interesting things in a sea of noise.

What FriendFeed needs to do to reach the average person is to find a way to drastically reduce noise without alienating the early adopters that have given feedback to the FriendFeed developers.

One way of reducing noise is reducing the capability to discover content. One way that FriendFeed alows content discovery is by “friend-of-friend” entries that you can see in FriendFeed. If you don’t know about friend-of-friend, it basically shows updates from person B if person A (your friend) “liked” or commented on person B’s item. It allows you to find more interesting people.

FriendFeed already allows you to hide friend-of-friend entries, but it may not always be obvious to the average person. What I think is a good solution would be for FriendFeed to hide friend-of-friend by default. Friend-of-friend shouldn’t completely die, though. There should be an option to turn it back on, for those that are okay with a little more noise.

Another problem with FriendFeed is the content duplication. If Friend A posts a blog post, and then Friends B and C share that blog post in Google Reader, you have three entries about the same thing floating around. When FriendFeed gets the capability to merge these, that will also be a major noise-reducer.

The average person might not know how to expertly use the FriendFeed “hide” link. FriendFeed should display tips to new users on how to use FriendFeed features, like the hide command, that might be less obvious to the average user.

To sum it up, what I believe FriendFeed needs to do is:

• Reduce noise by disabling friend-of-friend entries by default, but allow users to enable it if they choose to.
• Reduce noise by merging entries that link to the same page.
• Display tips to educate the average person on how to expertly use FriendFeed.

Other editors covered in this series:

• Geany
• Mousepad
• Gedit
• More to come

If there is one thing that it isn’t, KDevelop is not lightweight, as it’s main focus is features and flexibility.

When it has finished loading, you are are greeted with the following screen. Click on it to see the full size version.

You will notice that you have the ability to store code snippets in KDevelop, as I have demonstrated in the above screenshot with storing the tag that tells a browser to load an external CSS file

To create a new file, you first have to tell KDevelop where to put the file and what the filename is. This is done so the syntax highlighter knows what type of file it is.

KDevelop is a text editor that uses tabs, has a built in terminal, and you can read documentation from within it.

KDevelop is very customizable. There are many options you can set. Like other KDE programs, keyboard shortcuts are also editable. KDevelop can also access files on a remote server, thanks to KIO.

KDevelop supports syntax highlighting for many, many languages. Syntax highlighting is also customizable, should you not like the colors.

That concludes this informal overview of KDevelop. Give it a whirl and see if it fits your development needs.

See, possible248 today granted myself and i80and admin status within WordPress (I’ll have to talk to possible248 about his capitalization), and I have been exploring the options offered in the control panel. One of the tabs that intrigued me greatly was the import tab, which offers many options for importing content from other platforms:

That… is… so many platforms. Blogger being there is of particular interest, because I currently write for several blogs hosted on Blogger, my own among them.

So, to explain why six posts appeared on this site briefly: I decided to give the import a try on the smallest blog.

The import was completed very quickly using Google Data APIs. After the import was complete, I was given the opportunity to change the author of posts. I must say I am very impressed with WordPress’ ability to grab content from so many (13 plus itself) different sources.

It’s also reassuring to know that, if I ever choose I no longer like Blogger and want to host my own site, it will be a piece of cake to move to WordPress (which is what I’d probably choose). The only question there is moving back to Blogger if I ever decide to do that. But both situations are far out in the future, reserved for when I have the time and money to maintain my own hosting.

Meanwhile, I consider this experiment a success. Go WordPress!

You could use VYM to hash out the details of a new application, a database structure, or the organization of a website. I think I’ll find it pretty useful in developing ModCMS.

You can even export the mind map to XHTML. Sorta useful if you would like to use it for an interesting navigational system like the VYM website did.

Update: If you don’t like VYM, you can find many other mind-mapping applications at mind-mapping.org