If featureset and usability would decide my choice then Jaiku is the winner, but of course community is the ruling factor. Since the communities I want to be part of will continue to be spread out over many microblogging services (maybe even more so once Jaiku goes open source), I think I need to be active on several services for a foreseeable future.

Aggregated Consumption is not the same as Communication
There are many good services for consuming the posts from all my contacts across several microblogging services. FriendFeed is a great example, that also adds a lot of neat features (again, I am andreaskrohn).  Some desktop clients also let me consume messages from several services, Twhirl lets me subscribe to posts both from Twitter and Jaiku for example. Jaiku let me subscribe to RSS feeds, so that is a way for me to get my posts from other services into Jaiku. Bloggy has the very nice feature of letting me input my Twitter and Jaiku data and then all my posts from those services are also shown in my Bloggy feed, as well as all my Bloggy posts being posted to Jaiku and Twitter.

All this solutions do have a common problem though, and that is that they are missing what is key to microblogging – it is all about communication and communication is a two way game. From Twhirl I can only post to Twitter and not to Jaiku. My comments in FriendFeed can not be looped back into Twitter/Jaiku/Bloggy. From Bloggy I can read Jaiku posts, and I can post to Jaiku, but not participate in a threaded conversation on Jaiku. So consumption is not a problem, but communication across several services efficiently is.

By now I am sure several of my readers are thinking “skip all other services and just use Twitter and stop complaining”. This might be a good strategy if I only wanted to communicate with the Twitter crowd, but belive it or not there is acctually a world outside Twitter. Also, I am not complaning (not so far at least), just explaining a problem. A problem that is solvable!

Who are we Communicating with?
So what is the solution? As I see it the best solution would be a microblogging client that can do two-way communication with several microblogging services. So how would this client work if I could dream up a whishlist… To get to that wishlist let’s first think about how we divide up the people we communicate with, and personally I come up with these criteria:

• Language – people that do not understand Swedish do not want to read my Swedish posts, and most Swedes have a limited interest in my (admittedly very few) spanish Twitter posts. Almost everyone that follow me in any microblogging service could be interested in my posts in English.
• Geography – to a lesser degree than language geography also plays a role. It is of very limited interest for me to know that a friend in San Fransisco wants to gather people up to meet in a bar this evening, at the same time that same friend is probably not that interested in what train to Stockholm I might be on.
• Social group – almost the most important criteria. By “social group” I mean any group of people with similar interests or ties. It might be my family, it might be web developers, it might be fellow mashupoholics. This is the way we mostly group people in our lifes. My brother is not interested in, and can not answer, a question about SQL that I might have. The same way my developer contacts might not care about where my family is going to celebrate christmas.
• Individuals – we all want to communicate directly with certain people.

All microblogging services and clients address some of these criteria . Groups can be handled by Jaiku channels for example. You can communicate to individuals via the “@” notation or by directo messaging. By posting Swedish posts to Jaiku and Bloggy, and English posts to Twitter the language criteria is somewhat dealt with. But this is not a natural workflow, and it sprouts conversations about the same subject in many different places.

Whishlist for the perfect microblogging client
The perfect microblogging client would allow me to communicate across services in a fluent way. It would detect what language I am writing my messages in and only send it out to the people that understand that language, no matter what microblogging service they are using. Geography and social groups should also be handled seemlessly across microblogging bounderies. It would be able to aggregate all comments made to one message into one place to create one and only one joined conversation (minirant: why oh why don’t Twitter have threaded conversations?). If I can continue dreaming the perfect microbloggin client would not only contain microblogs but also the good old chat networks – MSN, Jabber etc – where I still have quite a few contacts. My hope is that this already exists, and that it just have passed me by, if so please let me know!

Faithful Digitalistic readers might remember that I ranted about this almost a year ago in the post The Need to Mashup Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku, but since nothing much has changed I took upon me to rant once more. Maybe in a year I will acctually do something about it myself, or maybe I will just write another rant

It was extremely easy to get the interaction with Twitter to work using Twitters super simple Search API. As a basis for my PHP code I used Simon Maddox’s Codeigniter Twitter library to speed up development even more. Basically the backend is nothing more than a cron job pinging Twitters Search API every few minutes for new tweets and then saving them in a database. Considering doing something more with this data at a later stage, but for now I just show it on the site. What took the most time was not figuring out how to use the Twitter API or to write the few lines of PHP needed. What took me time was to get the site to look good using CSS, but I am quite happy with the end result. Hopefully I can do some more of my own CSS work in the future.

MashupCrowd has already proved usefull for me in finding new innovative mashups. Today I found a cool use of Twitter to track the snow depth in the UK.

• You have to trust the API providers to keep that API up and running. Anyone that has done Twitter mashups know how much keeping an API up and running is worth.
• You have to trust the API providers to keep the API (somewhat) stable and to not remove features that you are depending on, or add features you really dont want. An example of this is all the mashups built on Google Maps, and we all know that there are way too many of those. Have the developers of those mashups really thought about what happens when Google puts ads on the Maps (and they will, they have already started in parts of the US)? I dont think so, the developers just trust Google to keep on going. If you have a commercial site using Google Maps you probably do not want ads for your competitors on those maps.
• If your mashup becomes a success you have to trust the API providers you are depending on not to change their terms of service so that your mashup suddenly becomes an illegal use of the API. Also, you have to trust the API provider not to use the fact that you are depending on their API for your business against you in a business negotiation.
• If you use web scraping you have to trust the site you scrape not to change to often (or at least trust your own ability to roll with the punches and update your scraping so it works with the new version of the site as well) etc. That is a lot of trust, and when mashups move from toys into real applications this becomes an issue.

All these things makes me a bit nervous, as I am a bit paranoid (note: this has not been clinically proven, I still think that THEY are out to get me). So how to mix a healthy bit of paranoia into my mashup building and get something good out of it all? What I do is that I always try to be aware of that I might have to switch API provider. Are you building a Twitter mashup? Why not also take a look at Jaiku’s API, or Pownce’s API (or Plurk or FriendFeed etc etc). You dont have to build your mashup so you can switch API provider in a matter of minutes, just be aware what else is out there so that you see the commonalities and don’t use to many features unique to one provider. This is the approach I am currently using when I am building mashups, at least I know that if shit hits the fan I can always go with somebody else. It will hurt a bit and take some effot, but I am not dead in the water. For the Google Maps example this would mean looking at Yahoo Maps and see what features the Yahoo Maps API have in common with the Google Maps API, and just use those common features. This can also come in handy if you hit the maximum number of requests on Google Maps, then it would be nice switch to Yahoo Maps automatically.

The risk with all this is of course to spend to much time preparing for something that won’t happen. It is the same situation as developers spending so much time making their code perfectly scalable and optimized that they acctually never ship anything in time. So dont go too far, but be aware of the situation. Trust is nice, but trusting several API providers to always do a good job and to not be evil in order for you to survive is quite risky.

It is quite easy to post to several microbloggins services at once. Jaiku does a great job of importing RSS feeds, so posts to Twitter or Pownce can easily be imported to Jaiku. Via Twitterfeed it is easy to get an RSS feed into your Twitter as well. I haven’t found any easy way of getting an RSS feed into Pownce. Also there are apps like Twhirl that let’s you post to all 3 platforms at once. In my case I also use the Twitter Facebook app to get my tweets into my Facebook status and I am looking for a way to do the same with LinkedIn (no success yet). So posting cross-platform is not a problem, even if it means that you need to do some configuration and that all your posts gets trippled or quadrupled.

Reading friends posts from several platforms could also easily be done. I could of course go to all the different services and read each posts on each one, but since I want to do other things with my day than that I would rather use services like FriendFeed or SocialThing that aggregates it all into one place. FriendFeed imports from most sources and have some nice comment features, but the UI really desperatly needs a designers touch. SocialThing imports from just a few places so far (please please add RSS now!) but I still prefer it to FriendFeed. These services and others make it easy to see your friends posts from several platforms in one place. What is missing is a way to naturally post back to the microblogging platforms from these services.

What is needed, and what will come very soon I am sure, is a mashup of all these microbloggin platforms to allow users to be active on several platforms at once all from one place. I would like to see an app that allows me to interact with Twitter, Pownce and Jaiku completely. This means reading other peoples posts, replying to posts to have a conversation going cross-platform and posting to all platforms at once. Since all of the platforms have APIs this should be possible to implement (and for all I know it already exists somewhere, if you know of such an app please let me know through a comment on this post!). This would be a great mashup that would breach the community silos that exists today. Short of everyone moving to one platform a mashup is the best answer to this problem.

Btw, I have some extra SocialThing invites so if anybody wants one please let me know via a comment on this post.