The whole twitter.com idea is based on the anti-feature that you can only type 140 characters per post. So the difference between a blog and a micro-blog is that the latter will restrict your own verbosity. In todays world, where i can barely cope with all the available information that interests me, such an anti-feature helps everyone.
- The author in the private press is not a professional journalist. Writing blog post always takes quite some time and work. If you write about something you should read about it first. Short messages seem to match the size of most thoughts.
- The reader wants a good read or at least a fast one. The wonderful thing with Hypertext are links and most topics are covered somewhere in the net in a higher quality the you could provide.
- Community communication is (online and offline) at least 50% chatter. But if the noise fits into 140 chars nobody cares.
But twitter.com is commercial and closed. Another project identi.ca uses an open source server laconi.ca and offers a good jabber implementation and lots of other features. Furthermore you can move your data to your own server and still be connected with the rest of identi.ca.
So identi.ca/mb0 it is! I added identi.ca to my jabber account and can now micro blog in seconds. I plan to install the laconi.ca server when the initial code burst settles.
I also recently installed my very own jabber server at mb0.org. My jabber contact is the same as my email, that is mb0@mb0.org . And if you are a programmer make sure to check out ECF (a video of ECF 2.0).
identi.ca still goes down from time to time for some minutes. and the jabber contact should really return a useful error message.