Tracking, the killer feature. Now Identi.ca has it too!
Wasn’t it the feature that killed twitter? Or maybe you’re wondering what it is. I’m only mentionning it since the laconi.ca federation is now supporting that feature, thanks to Dustin (oh, Dustin’s homepage is pretty cool too).
So you’re using twitter (or plurk, brightkite, pownce, maybe even identi.ca or one of its siblings) and you like it realtime, so of course you’re using SMS or Instant Messaging (Jabber, AIM, whatever). You’ve got your friends, your subscriptions. Wouldn’t it be nice to follow words too? And I don’t mean hashtags (words preceded with “#” to mark them of separately). I mean anything. Interested in what/when people get up or go to bed? Track “morning” and “night”, and watch the flow.
So, when did identica add this feature? Last night was supposed to add a bunch, like multilanguage, hashtags, etc. but tracking isn’t one of those announced features. It’s been coded separately by Dustin as I mentionned earlier, using the liberal feed laconi.ca provides as specified in the Open Microblogging spec and generous CC-BY licence.
To use tracking on identi.ca or another server (they’re all connected, remember. This is like email, where anyone can talk to anyone, no need to make hostages out of users), simply add laconica@west.spy.net to your Jabber buddies & type ‘help’. It’s basically the same as in twitter. “track KEYWORD” to track it, “untrack KEYWORD”, “tracks” to see what’s your tracking.
I love the laconica community! Keep it up! Oh, and for hashtags and multilingual support, it should be coming out very soon, probably after the icommons summit.
It’s like the internet is a big bunch of disconnected cooperative complementary thingies instead of Compuserve. That’s crazy!
Comment by Lucas Gonze — 2008/07/30 @ 17:42
Who would have thought ;)
See also autonomo.us, an independent group of hackers, activists, and scholars exploring the ideas of user freedom and autonomy as they relate to network communication technologies and the Open Network Service definition.
Comment by Robin — 2008/07/30 @ 17:52
Upgrade should happen tonight, actually; I was just being nice to the iCommons folks last night because they were right in the middle of their conference.
Comment by Evan Prodromou — 2008/07/30 @ 19:03
Il serait intéressant pour de nombreux indépendants de mettre au point à partir de identi.ca par exemple, un système de time tracker avec une visualisation de l’activité à la journée, la semaine et le mois. Il semble que le fait de pouvoir tracker des mots et le fait que notre “microblog” est horodaté rend cette fonctionnalité de timetracker au bord d’être réalisé. Si quelqu’un code et a le temps…
Comment by Aline — 2008/07/31 @ 18:05