Microforums

So the Twitter API changed and authentication no longer works in the same way. As a result, if you use Twhirl, you can't post to Twitter. If you are cross posting to Twitter from Laconica, it will still work. The symptom is that if you change your credentials for Twitter (Settings->Twitter) or if you are entering your Twitters creds for the first time, it will appear as if you are not giving the correct password.

A change in the Twitter API broke Laconica and Twhirl last night. Here's a quick way to get the issue fixed in Laconica before the updates are available. Nothing to do for Twhirl but wait. Continue reading "Twitter API change broke ... »

I was curious how long it would take to install my own microforum using Laconica of which I've spoken many, many times.

It took me about 16 minutes, but I cheated. I've installed it a few times before.

Get the latest version by grabbing the link at http://laconi.ca

Today, at the top of the list: 11/23/2008 Laconica_0.6.3

The version will of course advance as time goes on. Continue reading "Set up a Laconica Instance ... »

You can post to your Laconica instance via email. Extra steps are needed to use email-related functionality.
On *nix platform servers if you are running sendmail email is configured in the /etc/mail directory in files virtusertable and aliases. Skip the rest of this if you run Windows or qmail.

In /etc/mail/virtusertable either modify or add the line to route ANY unrecognized address to the Laconica mailerdaemon, which is not a daemon at all but a filter.

@yourdomain.tld laconica_mail_script

In /etc/mail/aliases add this line using the full path to the file in the Laconica distribution

laconica_mail_script: "|/full_path_to_your_installation_/scripts/maildaemon.php"

Make sure this file is executable and if it isn't, do this:

chmod +x path_to_it/maildaemon.php

What the above does is this: if an email arrives that is not for an address listed in virtusertable, it will be passed to the filter included in Laconica, a file called maildaemon.php

What the filter does is check the address against the list of valid users and if it finds it, and if the email is coming from the associated address, it publishes the email contents as a post.

Note that if your address is compromised, it's trivial to then spoof the From email and post to your account. Laconica should probably add a password to the title of emails sent to it.

Note in passing, you can run several Laconica instances on different domains on one server and use one domain to send the mail. All that is configured in the config.php file.

Speaking of email, Laconica currently uses email to send SMS. On my particular provider, all I get is a free SMS with "you've got mail" heads up, so it isn't too useful, but if your provider allows SMS via email, you might want to try this. In the meantime, the email post allows you to talk to your Laconica instance from your cell if browsing is not comfortable (i.e., you don't have a modern phone, which I do not) or if browsing is too expensive.

Let's back up and look at the most basic uses of a microforum built on Laconica.

Suppose we have a local Alpha-Roméo club. Further suppose they have an active forum built on the excellent the phpBB. What could our Elm Street Alpha Club ("ESAC") possibly do with a microforum?

Realtime news
First, insert feeds from the existing traditional forum into the ESAC Microforum using TwitterFeed. This excellent service will take an RSS feed and post it automatically on your Laconica instance. The forum titles with links to the posts are now available without visiting the forum. Suppose you're the admin of that forum. You can look at what's going on there simply by monitoring the Laconica instance.

Other client apps
I need to pause here to mention something I find crucial to the choice of Laconica as a platform: the fact that Twhirl works perfectly with it. If our club members want to be on Twitter and monitor their club site, they can do this in two different windows with Twhirl. The Twhirl client also refreshes automatically and takes up less space in a window. Continue reading "Basic Microforum Features ... »

Even if you use only Twitter and have some close friends, co-workers or your own company, you would want to set up an OpenMicroBlogging site that communicates with Twitter. Here's why.

Evan pointed out to me just now on http://identi.ca that Laconica isn't meant to be a front end for Twitter. I'm just pointing out that it can be used that way, that it's a nice feature but not the principal interest of Laconica.

Twitter is not under your control, it has outages (like anything in the cloud). If you set up Laconica (or other software) instance on your own server,

Members can configure their Tweets to be sent to Twitter AND keep them archived and they remain searchable on your server.

Members can subscribe to friends on Twitter or indenti.ca and see their activity on your/their server.

You can set up a "network" of these communities on the model of say, branch offices of your company or your family.

You can communicate with any other Laconica instance.

Currently, Laconica works with Twhirl, which is an excellent thing. If you like TweetDeck (in beta, but looks very promising) you should consider visiting their site and voting for Laconica support.



Laconica isn't necessarily to replace Twitter, it is a tool, like Twhirl or Tweetdeck, to be that can used with Twitter. It shines on its own, of course, but the use with Twitter makes it easier for some.

I just installed an instance from scratch to see how long it took. I tried to document what I did here: http://tr.im/ageless but I probably missed some things.

Laconica remains my favorite choice today only because of Twhirl support and its stability to date. OpenMicroBlogger.org is certainly a viable choice if you want to access only on the web. Their plugin archetecture is a winning idea and a whole ecosystem could evolve around that in this day of published API.

The rest of this will be about the name (again) and making more people aware of Laconica. Continue reading "Twitter Rocks: Long live ... »

If #magpie or other monetizing services bother you, but you don't want to drop people because the rest of their stuff is of interest, we'll need to be able to drop messages containing certain tags.

I think this is as valid for any keyword, since tweets (or mu) are short, just allow an unlimited list of keywords which, if encountered, "drop" (don't display in main feed) that post.

So, the next time people start with the bacon or the iphone, you can avoid allt hat by having a client that culls the posts. Does TweetDeck do this? (yet?)

I'm not a blogger. And now to prove it, I'll post in this blog, again.

I'm not a social media expert or a web site designer. I don't have a zillion followers on Twitter (randulo) and no one cares what I say on Friendfeed or anywhere else. So what do I know?

I know that my company got its best account, one we still service, on a Compuserve forum in about 1996. I answered a single post on that forum, emailed and went to see the person and we've been working together for the last 12 years. I know how forums work having written my own (in C and in PHP) and having set up most common open source forums. I've maintained large instances of phpBB for the last 15 years. Fifteen years on the Internet is like saying, "founded in 1855" in other businesses.

Continue reading "What do we know about ... »

If you haven't read about my microforum philosophy, look at the previous few posts to this one in this section aptly called "Microforums".

Case study: A social network on Ning with over 1,000 members. At least few hundred of them are active on Twitter. Many other people on Twitter might be interested in the professional group represented by the network without having heard of it yet.

What Twitter can do: Banter but no way to separate into subjects. Each person needs to go find and follow people and constantly update their list. Even then, during certain events where a lot of activity is not necessarily of interest to them, they need to unfollow some people and put them back later.

Laconica, while it's a nice project, does not appear to want to progress in the direction I am looking for. One of the most active threads on their mailing list is whether they should keep the name laconica or change it to the slightly better-known identi.ca, aka, "Twitter clone".

Yonkly can be installed for a price, the project seems to want to progress in user-suggested features, but it's based on .NET which is out of the question. We just don't run .NET servers and never probably will.

OpenMicroblogger.org is something that bears watching, but I'm not that keen on its best features (link and image posts built in), even though I see that some would want them. I'll need to revisit them soon.

I am trying Tweetworks "in desperation" because it looks like the closest thing to what I'd like to see as a point of departure. I don't really want a hosted system and even less one that depends on Twitter, but we must use the labs we can get to experiement.

Tweetworks may be obscured if Twitter introduces groups some day, and this seems to be inevitable. I hear the have them already in Japanese. Christopher Penn suggests using Yahoo Pipes to create Twitter Groups. Another site you can join organizes Twitter contacts into a group.

Missing features

Besides being hosted and built on Twitter, here are the problems I have with Tweetworks.

First, the option to post on Twitter at the same time is terrific, it's one of the best advantages of the standard used by laconica and openmicroblogger. The problem on Tweetworks is the interface and possibilities offered to control this. I suggest the option be made a toggle or that users be allowed to select the default action. That way if you feel inspired, you check the box for this one brilliant piece of 140 character universal wisdom and it is posted on Twitter. The rest of the time, your group discussion remains on Tweetworks only.

Second, unless it can be made to work with some existing clients like Twhirl and more importantly on smartphone (read iPhone), it won't lower the bar enough.

Third, and no one is doing this anywhere that I know of except on IRC, some kind of ignore function is needed. Maybe it needs to be better than just a single person ignore. Maybe "ignore this thread" is needed. Maybe "mute this person for 24 hours"? Whatever the exact functionality might be, in a community of hundreds or thousands, you will need to ignore one or more people sooner or later.

Finally, and I think this is one of the most original features in my scenario, ignore statistics.

In its simplest form, the admin can see these and possibly whisper something in the ear of the "offender". Possibly it would be of interest to show the number of people ignoring someone on their page along with following or favorites. And for the coup de grâce, a temporary mute action based on the ratio of followers to ignorers, configured by the admin. These features using ignore statistics are all optional. They can be compared to the rating phenomenon, started by Digg, replicated in many places but little used outside of Digg-like or bookmarking sites.

Building a viable community is about member comfort. As Tower of Power said, "We Came to Play".
First, in my quest to build Twitter-like microforums for communities, I tried OpenMicroBlogger, which is interesting because it has image and link functions built in. Then I tried laconica, which is great too. Neither fills the need I see. It is starting to look like Yammer comes closest in functionality, but Yammer is hosted and branded as far as I know, so it isn't a contender for me. I'm looking into others, too.

The reason Twitter can't work is that it's too noisy and too general in interest. Let's define "community" as a group of people who share an interest. I think it was in the book The Long Tail that I read that the best-selling book at the on self-publish, print-on-demand Lulu.com is a book about one breed of dog. Talk about a vertical market! There could also be a geographical related element like neighborhoods, cities etc. Since I am interested in wine, let's say I have a tasting group that meets every Thursday night.

So I set up my laconica server and make it known that all 100 people on our list are welcome at the server. Of course in many cases, we'd be talking about hundreds or thousands of members, or more. Now, one of the critical reasons for setting up a private server is that Twitter requires you to follow those you want to "hear". Of course the public timeline can't be followed because it's too much. But in a like-minded community, it probably will NOT be too much to follow the public timeline.

Why follow the public timeline?

This is key to my own needs. This is a community. You have a strong sense of shared interests. It's too much work to find people and follow them. The microforum is the one case where I want to see opt-out rather than opt-in. With this philosophy (like IRC by the way) you enter a channel. You see every comment that goes by. You "auto-discover" all participants, unlike say Twitter.

Why you need an ignore function
In any group there are going to be people you want to ignore or just temporarily shut out. IRC handles this beautifully with the ignore function. Depending on your client setup, ignore (plonk lists on newsgroups) the ignore list may be permanent or just for the session.

My own, admittedly subjective and maybe selfish vision of the microforums (damn it they are not microblogs!) is simple. The simpler the better. The average person isn't a geek delighting in OMB or whatever other acronyms and technologies and they frankly do not care about whether they are on open source or commercial technology.

I want a server that can quickly and easily be set up on our *nix-based shared hosting with these qualities:

• An ignore list as well as a subscribe (follow) list
  
• Simple admin controls that allow putting unpopular users on a subscribe-only basis
  
• Groups (Yammer now has this)
  

Here's my "dream" scenario:

I send people invites to the server. They register and follow the public timeline. Most will do this, checking from time to time, contributing to the talk, using all the existing mechanisms. They have available the option to look at topic groups. These would be decided by the server owner. The members can also opt to follow people and watch only their buddy (subscription) list.

In this day and age much is made of Digg and the rest of shared rating systems. I would like to see the ignore list as data on the server. On the member's profile page, "ignored by" stats next to the subscriptions and "followed by" stats would be interesting. If some percentage of the users (determined by the owners) is ignoring someone, the site admin could be notified by email. Likewise for subscriptions.

What I am suggesting isn't born from a wish to dominate, it's really how most forums are set up. phpBB3 has pretty much all of these tools and communities live comfortably with rules and admin tools.

I believe there's a wonderful future out there for the software that eventually provides the flexibility that makes it easy and fast to enjoy a community microforum.

I believe in the future of microforums. Laconica needs an ignore function for them to work.

While it's sad to want to exclude people rather than communicate with them, let me explain why this would be the next desirable feature IMO, and why I'm ready to start the bounty off with my own money.

First, I've seen a spam campaign ripple through Leo Laporte's TWIT Army. No one was happy with the poster sending a stream of several Engadget RSS items per hour robotically with no other participation. In fact, (s)he only became human to come and taunt people who commented on how sick they were of it. Eventually, the TwitterFeed was disabled for the entire site. Now who's penalized?



Secondly, I see the microforum as a like-minded community. Instead of searching for people you might want to follow like you do on Twitter, you should be able to watch the public timeline and ignore individual posters.

Thirdly, statistics would be available in real time of the ignored posters. That makes it possible to display unpopularity, discouraging odious behavior. Should posters with to score high at being obnoxious, there could be a limit beyond which their posts were invisible except to people who subscribed to them (one mans's meat is another's poison).

Microforums will make real time community discussion easy.
As a longtime forum denizen, I have a few issues with community forums. They are often used for the kind of banter that needs only a line or two. "Anyone had the 1989 Haut-Brion?" or "How do I boot Windows in safe mode?" are typical. In the thread that follows, untrimmed quotes, non-sequitor answers, and long-winded useless opinions often follow. This was great fun in the days when we used 14kbps modems, LOL, and had an available attention glut. Today, only people with serious time on their hands can really do this, and only in one or two places, probably. We need to streamline our forum activities, not to go faster but to give more and get more out of them.

Continue reading "Forget Microblogging, Build ... »