SiliconANGLE - Latest Comments in Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 16:50:03 -0000

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Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Taylor Marek — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:31:24 -0000

Good read, haven't had one of those in a while. :D Keep cranking out awesome content and I'll be back for more!

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

andrewnim — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:52:17 -0000

The main issue with Twitter, FB,FF etc is that its all in the hands one one company. Same is true of Google's attempts and wave if and when it does arrive. FB could create a wave like application using FF. But which would you use?
The attraction of a new social media built on the backbone of Buddy Press/ Wordpress comes from its independance. Its confederation. Let you be your server and just appear on other peoples sites. But if they go down, you are fine. Opera have this idea with their server in a browser. Of course it means you are always on, or you have an agent who is. A social media server rather than a webserver.
Jesse's comment about trust misses a vital issue, FB like Google seeks to know lots about you and has more of your personal data. Twitter does not.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:43:18 -0000

I think you're focusing too closely on the here and now.

It's not ready to be the successor today as it stands - down the road, though, it's positioned to take up the mantle, particularly if the federated aspects of the activity stream on the BP side come into fruition...

... particularly considering that as far as geeky and complex systems go, it's pretty low maintenance, and as far as general user experiences go, it's the simplest thing in the world to leave a comment and interact with a blog.

i was looking at this earlier today - by the metrics that FF, FB, and Twitter judge themselves by, Wordpress.com knocks their dicks in the dirt completely, with over a billion unique users: http://en.wordpress.com/stats/

Something to ponder.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

simonbaptist — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:14:02 -0000

Having been off coffee for three months in prep for the birth of our 2nd child, when I recently had coffee again, I started buzzing and came up with the idea of Personal Brand Stewardship (PBS).

Basic concept is that in the age of the prototype (or permanent beta), we have a responsibility to manage our brand effectively across the open web.

Part of that responsibility is having full control and not give too much to one particular tool that is in the hands of others. Or another way of looking at that is, why should a particular hot destination get all the financial benefits from me using it and I get nothing in return.

Look at Winer's thoughts on Scoble and his lack of even getting a hat-tip for his Friendfeed evangelism.

As so, when you say Wordpress(.org) could be the successor, I get it and agree...for those at the bleeding edge.

My question is then. What's out there for the average punter?

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:22:03 -0000

If you were to set up each user's blog with a P2 style theme, and use tools like FeedWordPress to aggregate other sources, you have exactly what you're describing, pretty much.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Otto — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:09:12 -0000

Buddypress basically adds friend features to a multi-user blogging system, which is not what I need. But if you redefine each users "blog" on such a system as their aggregation of content from elsewhere, then you've got something.

Still, I don't quite grasp BP yet, so I'm hesitant to use it. It looks like it's trying to be a local version of Facebook or something.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:46:35 -0000

The federation is the tough issue... I had planned on looking more deeply into it myself before I caught the fact that it was on the Buddypress roadmap already.

My head is a bit too cloudy to properly formulate my thoughts on this. I originally considered DB2DB syndication of the actual posts in everyone WP installation, but...

Buddypress activity streams, with syndicated summaries, leapt out at me as I was crawling thru the MU codex. For the most part, the Buddypress activity stream keeps track of all activity on an MU website. That activity stream could be synchronized to a central server (or set of servers) for re-use on all in-network systems.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Sean P. Aune — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:40:09 -0000

Gee... are we are going to discuss "federated real time web" for a THIRD week on CobWEBs?;)

Kidding aside, you hit the nail on the head with this, "I’m tired of constantly re-entering all of my information and accounts into services I start to care about, evangelize for, and enjoy only to have them radically changed either by cultural shifts, sales, closures or policy changes." We all KNOW FriendFeed is now doomed, and yet we all run like Lemmings to the next solution... which will last a year or so.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Otto — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:34:36 -0000

It is an interesting idea. It would not be too difficult to set up a series of plugins (or one multi-plugin) to essentially do what FriendFeed does, which is to crawl a series of feeds for each person and pull the data in for republishing and commenting purposes.

The problem I see is one of subscriptions. How does the federation and sharing between sites work? How do I have a central view of data that is in a cloud form? The reason I like FriendFeed so much is the interface makes it easy for me to see and converse with other people. Having to jump between sites and interfaces to do that is a pain in the ass, and kills the utility of such a system.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Robert Cadena — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:33:39 -0000

Looking forward to your posts on these issues. I think for the time being, most people will continue to use twitter and facebook to get at my updates. In the future some other hub will become popular but regular users won't see it as such. The system should encourage these hubs to provide the user's data back to the user to make migration easier, a feature which, I think, many providers will balk at or will try to overcome by providing "value added" services for which data cannot be migrated.

Again, looking forward to your posts on these issues.

FidoNet :) I remember how pleasant it felt to hear my 1200 baud modem automatically call at midnight into the next city to synch my bbs' fidonet messages.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:23:43 -0000

I've given a lot of thought to this - I'll probably do some posts on this later if I can muster the energy (suffering from a lot of allergy issues at the moment!)...

Not everyone in this scenario needs to be a WP admin. I think that the setup would look a lot like the communities we have set up around blogs and info portals now - Blog writers / editors could function as the administrators of the system, and with a FidoNet / Federated style set up, the larger public timeline can pass through their systems.

In essence, the users would only need to know where their favorite network node was - and the geekier folks in the crowd would worry about the headache of running the local 'chapter of the network.'

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Robert Cadena — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:09:55 -0000

What's the entry point for users into this federated stream? I'm with this. I think this is the way to go because I don't like how unreliable twitter is, the spam, the control, etc. But, I'm in the minority of people who can self-host their own blogs and modify the code, create my own plugins, etc.

What I think about are my highschool friends who are not programmers like I am, who follow me and their friends because they're on facebook. Facebook enables them to easily follow friends and update their friends. How do they enter the system? I see them as still being facebook and my self-hosted platform posting to facebook. They will then continue to see my posts. Same with twitter.

I think there means to do this exist, the biggest obstacle will be that experience hurdle, how to overcome discovery, how to make it easy to follow, how to make sure there's a trail of trust to make sure that spammers can't impersonate, how to make sure that conversation threads maintain their integrity with respect to time and participants. We need some designers weighing in on this.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark Essel — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:04:29 -0000

I hope you're right. I'd love to see a decentralized wordpress based real time web. I thought about P2 being part of that solution but there are many layers. Real time connectivity, identity portability between hubs or local social networks, and a way to pull them together into your own personal viewer.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

ian morton — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:04:08 -0000

Seems to me that the power is with the independent apps that allow us to read all the feeds without being confined to just one. There just needs to be a move to having the data remain if the service disappears - look at the loss at magnolia or the crashes at url shortening sites...

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

othylmann — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:02:21 -0000

I suggest you take a look noserub.com.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 14:02:10 -0000

The theme we use on /SAbackchan is a good place to start:
http://wordpress.org/extend...

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

jstratford — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:57:01 -0000

Great post! It's intriguing to see how Wordpress is so viable with the utilization of Buddy Press. Will have to checkout the themes built for real time interaction.

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:24:30 -0000

Interesting.
We were just discussing that topic a week or two ago here:
http://siliconangle.com/ver...

Re: Could Wordpress Be the Natural Successor to Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook?

robfelty — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:01:15 -0000

Nice article. I am starting to feel this way too. On a related note, I should note that if you want to post to a self-hosted wordpress blog via e-mail, I recommend the postie plugin, which I maintain. For wordpress.com users, they have just recently added more post by e-mail features which are quite nice.