Author Archives: Ryan Markel

rStat.us and “Decentralized Twitter”

ReadWriteCloud:

rStat.us is an OStatus-based microblogging service built by Steve Klabnik and others using Ruby, Sinatra and MongoDB. Because it uses OStatus, it’s compatible with Identi.ca and StatusNet microblogs. In order to follow someone from Identi.ca, just paste the ATOM feed from their profile into rStat.us. Theoretically this should work both ways, but I was unable to subscribe to my own rStat.us account from Identi.ca account.

Yeah, good luck with that.

WordPress and other publishing platforms work well decentralized specifically because they don’t require a single locus to function with each other. There are pingbacks and comments—and if you want to follow another site you generally do it with RSS. It’s the language of publishing platforms. You can do neat stuff with a single locus (like the social features on WordPress.com), but it’s not necessary for the ecosystem to function.

Social services like Twitter and Facebook are popular because they focus people’s attention in the same area. It’s a single place where people can find their friends and people they want to Internet-stalk, and that makes it easy to connect.

Pasting an Atom feed? It’s not going to work because that’s not the language of social services. You’ve already made it too hard.

Updates to Sharedaddy Tutorials (Now with More Jetpack!)

I just updated my two tutorial posts on adding custom sharing services to Sharedaddy, which is now bundled with Jetpack for WordPress:

These are by far the most popular posts here, so I thought I should give them some long overdue attention.

I’ve added the missing variables and have added Tumblr as a sharing service to the list. This weekend I hope to go through the rest of the requests and add them into the post, as well as clean up some of the markup, which doesn’t play as nice with my new theme so it looks kind of ugly right now.

Limewire’s $75 Trillion

Devin Coldewey for TechCrunch:

The record companies suing Limewire were asked to estimate the damages that should be paid by the file-sharing service. Their estimate? $400 Billion on the low end, and at the high end — $75 trillion dollars. That’s more than the GDP of the entire world.

The last gasp of a dying industry cartel.

Color

There’s been so much discussion on Color that there are even posts talking about how much discussion there has been. Regardless of this, I am going to tell you what I think of it and why I think it’s a poor concept and why it won’t fly—at least with me. I’d love to be proven wrong (and I think Sequoia would love for me to be proven wrong as well, with a pre-launch $41 million round that’s the talk of the town), but let’s roll with this.

Continue reading →

3/29 Rock Band DLC: Here We Go Again

Rock Band forum thread is here.

Days of Peace Pack 01

  • Jefferson Airplane – “Somebody to Love”
  • Blood, Sweat & Tears – “Spinning Wheel”
  • Santana – “Black Magic Woman”

Sold. A thousand times sold, just for “Black Magic Woman,” but “Somebody to Love” is an unexpected treat.

Singles

DragonForce – “Through the Fire and Flames”
DragonForce – “Operation Ground and Pound”

I’m not sure I want to put myself through this again, though honestly “Through the Fire and Flames” has some good memories attached to it. And it’s kind of stupid fun, even if it is ridiculous.

I present as proof:

Guitar porn.