Juick.com – the other way to microblog using XMPP
I don’t quite remember how I stumbled upon this page on Nicolas Verite’s French-language blog about instant messaging and open standards, but this is how I found a microblogging system called Juick. Its claim to fame is that it is entirely XMPP based. I had written about Identichat is a Jabber/XMPP interface to Laconi.caStatus.net – but this is something different : not merely providing an interface to a generic microblogging service, it leverages XMPP by building the microblogging service around it.
As Joshua Price discovered Juick almost a year before me, I’m going to recycle his introduction to the service – he paraphrases Juick’s help page anyway :
Juick is a web service that takes XMPP messages and creates a microblog using those messages as entries [..] There’s no registration, no signup, no hassle. You simply send a XMPP message to “juick@juick.com” and it creates a blog based on the username you sent from and begins recording submissions.
- Add “juick@juick.com” to your contact list in your Jabber client or GMail.
- Prepare whatever message you want juick to record
- Send your message
That’s it. Juick will respond immediately telling you the message has been posted, and will provide you with a web address to view your new entry.
The simplicity of an account creation process that sniffs your Jabber vCard is something to behold – I makes any other sign-up process feel ponderous. This poor man’s OpenID Attribute Exchange does the job with several orders of magnitude less complexity.
Almost every interaction with Juick can be performed from the cozy comfort of your favorite XMPP client – including threaded replies which are something that Status.net’s Jabber bot is not yet capable of handling (edit – thanks to Aaron for letting us know that Status.net’s Jabber bot has always been able to do that too). And contrary to every microblogging service that I have known, the presence information is displayed on the web site – take a look at Nÿco’s subscribers for a example.
The drawbacks is that this is a small social network intended for Russophones, and the software is not free. But still, it is an original project whose features may serve as inspiration for others.
For some technical information about Stoyan Zhekov‘s presentation :
3 responses to “Juick.com – the other way to microblog using XMPP”
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[…] week-end I noticed Juick, an XMPP-based microblogging system with some nice original features. But Juick is not free and its author does not seem interested in freedom. So who’s gonna […]
You said:
That’s not true. Status.net’s Jabber bot is perfectly capable of keeping notices in contextual threads. It’s my only way of interacting with the service as a result (and until they get it back online, I’m not really in the mood to use the service). You’ll notice that at the end of every notice is an identifier. Send “reply # @user notice” to keep your reply in perfect context. This has been implemented into the bot since day one.
I must admit that I missed that bit of functionality. Thanks for setting the record straight – I corrected the article.