my 140 plus » Social http://www.my140plus.com Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:11:14 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Internal microblogging, alternative to yammer : status.net http://www.my140plus.com/2009/10/internal-microblogging-alternative-to-yammer-status-net/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://www.my140plus.com/2009/10/internal-microblogging-alternative-to-yammer-status-net/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:46:48 +0000 nverdo http://www.my140plus.com/?p=43 Many people in the web 2.0 business are twitter users. Ok not all of them are very active, but they get the general idea. Let’s face it #irc is quite web 1.0 and microblogging seems the perfect way to share information within your organization. So a lot of these companies started using yammer, instead of twitter since they didn’t want their sometimes confidential internal communication to end up in the wrong hands.

Today I came across http://status.net an open source microblogging tool. Maybe you already heard about http://identi.ca an alternative to twitter which is based on the StatusNet software (formerly called laconi.ca). This software is open source and can be downloaded here. The software is based on php and mysql and has some dependencies on gd and curl.

In about 30 minutes the site was up and running. The documentation and especially the installation instructions were a bit outdated, so it was pretty much a trial and error thing. I had some issues getting gd and curl enabled for php and I struggled a bit with the fancy urls (e.g. http://status.net/nverdo/all in stead of a url with lots of parameters) required some changes to the AllowOveride attribute in apache. If you want to get an idea what can be configured your best bet is the config.sample.php. This file contains a lot of commented settings which you can experiment with.

So today some of the ebuddy team already started experimenting with our internal twitter like system. The idea is everyone can inform others of events, from a build going to staging or inform people of an issue. We can also integrate it with our continuous integration server (TeamCity) via jabber and our monitoring tools, so together with the ‘human’ updates everyone can subscribe to the information which is relevant to them. Like twitter it has search capability, and since updates have timestamps, this also provides an event log.

]]> http://www.my140plus.com/2009/10/internal-microblogging-alternative-to-yammer-status-net/feed/ 2 Revenge of the Nerds http://www.my140plus.com/2009/10/revenge-of-the-nerds/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://www.my140plus.com/2009/10/revenge-of-the-nerds/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 22:11:09 +0000 nverdo http://www.my140plus.com/?p=6 Off course you all remember the movie from the 80’s where the geeks overcome the jocks and take home the cheerleaders. But this then probably perceived as the unthinkable may just have become a reality. The social revolution which has really started to pickup in 2006, brought about many startups which have tried to take their share. But most prominent are quite obviously facebook and twitter.

The CEO’s of these companies, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Suckerberg, don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of respect for these guys, but just looking at them, they aren’t exactly prototype highschool hunks.

I guess it comes as no surprise that so called nerds who are generally the shy types, not really fond of face to face social interaction, ‘invented’ other means of communication. The companies from Mark and Jack have changed our every day communication and social interaction in particular, but there are millions of ‘nerds’ out there (I consider myself one of them) who work for companies in this new communication space, some more successful than others, who keep contributing to the social revolution.

Twitter has probably been the most significant in changing online social interaction. In fact Facebook’s homepage was recently changed to resemble a more twitter like stream, instead of their previous Wall format. An interesting concluding fact, twitter only just recently surpassed 5 billion total tweets, which is if you think about it quite minimal for a service which has influenced our online interaction already so much. BTW at my employer ebuddy.com we are not really impressed with 5 billion messages though :-)

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