A website that accumulates mood lines of people similar to presence announcements or /me actions, with other people subscribing to these microblogs. Microblogging serves a purpose somewhere in the range between newscasting and friendcasting.

Microblog comes with its own user interface culture. See Followers and Hashtags for discussion on how some of that is being integrated into the PSYC experience.

Microblogging was made popular by Twitter. psyced comes with Twitter gateway functions. Read about it on the Twitter page.

Microblogging is evolving into Life streaming, where all sorts of net events related to a person come together, like photo uploads, a favourite video clip or the result of a game.

Elaborate microblogging also allows for comments and thus discussion about any event. Facebook also added a like button which merely allows you to show appreciation for somebody else's status update. Of course many people have asked for a don't like function to follow.

It would make sense to allow any PSYC event to be a comment to an earlier PSYC event, for instance by providing its packet id in a variable called _reference. But this is just a thought.

See also Talk:Social network, Laconica and pubsub in general.

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Status update

At some point the term status update overtook the word microblogging. In PSYCish thinking a status update is a _notice_update since a _status is something that did not change. But in some cases we just consider it a type of _message.

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Microblogging in psyced

By adding a tuning called _flag_enable_module_microblogging to local.h you can activate some nifty new features:

  • By typing /go ~nick#follow a user nick can enter his own followership channel.
  • This channel is technically implemented by net/place/userthreads, a variation of the threaded discussion chatroom, specialized on microblogging.
  • The /blog command lets you publish microblogs. See threads for the other commands available in blog rooms.
  • Your blogs appear on your profile page when you or your friends /surf to it.
  • There is a Javascript comment functionality there, but you can also use slash commands if you just enter the person's #follow channel.
  • By means of /privacy public you can make all publications visible to the world, that means they will also appear on your public profile that requires no PSYC authentication. You get the URL for that from your own /whois.
  • If you activate /twitter yes your microblogs will also be published on your Twitter account. Just follow the procedure provided by the OAuth link.
  • Same goes for /identica yes

This documentation is just as experimental as the code.

Note for administrators: Before you can offer Twitter and Identica gateways to your users you need to register your OAuth.