about Twitter
Taken from Centralistic:
Twitter is a centralistic microblogging service with a mostly open API. psyced implements a bit of that. Unusual about it is its SMS integration.Probably for reasons of spamming and malmarketing you can follow up to 2000 people, maybe less in future. You may argue, that the service becomes pretty unuseful with so many subscriptions in place, anyway. Then again all those trend researchers require automatic analysis of pretty much every posting on the service.
- Message storage in absence
- Limit on amount of contacts
It notably ran into scalability issues (or rather, complete blackouts) during popular events.
- Problems due to heavy load
@replies, #hashtags and the client API with its 100 calls an hour limit are all hacks compared to a true chat and messaging subsystem. And still you have no chatrooms, just the complete audience of your entire listenership. Yet, every Twitterer would argue that microblogging isn't the same as chatting, which is true. There are subtle differences in the approach, which aren't typically covered by a chat system. The technological implications are very similar instead.
- No interactive chat functions
The @replies are increasingly being abused for spam. The mechanism that was supposed to give the fan a way to reach out for a VIP starts to fail as popularity rises. Hashtag spamming and direct message spamming are also quite annoying. Recently trojans are increasingly being offered by direct message.
- SPAM-friendliness
Real-time content from Twitter
psyced comes with a Twitter to newsfeed gateway. This extends the options on how to feed PSYC's newscasting. This adds a dependency on a commercial offering, which strives to be the one-stop-shop for headlines and other status updates.
It receives a stream of new status updates from a preconfigured Twitter account in real-time and redistributes them to places named accordingly to the screen names of the followed Twitter accounts. The choice of followed accounts is up to the owner of the gateway account. The psyc://ve.symlynX.com server currently uses the twitter:psyced account. A listing function will allow you to choose the available feeds. To name some examples:
It is thus possible for each PSYC person to make her own selection of subscriptions. The Twitter account aggregates all of these newsfeeds and streams it to psyced using their Streaming API, thus being a lot less resource intensive than running a choice of RSS gateways.
The good news for Twitter servers is, they have less load to handle compared to each PSYC user running a polling native Twitter client. A drawback is, they no longer have a completely accurate notion of how many people are following content, which should be seen as a privacy plus on the side of the readers. The psyced gateway however does not provide means to send reply tweets, so PSYC users may later also become Twitter users in order to write comment statements.
Reasons to use PSYC for distribution are realtimeness and scalability as a decentralized multicast network may scale better than a centralistic/cloud-like infrastructure (at least most current clouds aren't architected using multicast). It is also politically open rather than proprietary and inducing dependence.
Another reason is bandwidth. Twitter clients are poll technology, which may be not so good in a mobile kind of environment. PSYC pushes updates to your client as they happen, so if you're the kind who prefers to just receive a dozen notifications per day, rather than checking your iPhone every two minutes, PSYC would deliver just that to you.
Producing the newscast directly using PSYC is faster than via Twitter, but the question is where your audience is. psyced does not provide a gateway into Twitter yet.
Cross-publishing microblogs from PSYC to Twitter
The Twitter API has been a little high churn in 2009[1], but that hasn't stopped other implementors[2] from duplicating the Twitter API in order to take advantage of software packages that allow users to change the API URL[3]. This creates an ideal situation for psyced to leverage the productivity others have wasted on Twitter-related development to bring content into the PSYC network.
Now, by means of OAuth any psyced deployment can also act as a Twitter client for each of its users. See Microblogging for the details on how to publish microblogs on PSYC and have them submitted to Twitter or Identica for that matter.