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.

1. Add “juick@juick.com” to your contact list in your Jabber client or GMail.
2. Prepare whatever message you want juick to record
3. 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 :

Gnutella was the first decentralized file sharing network. It celebrated a decade of existence on March 14, 2010. Once Audiogalaxy went down in 2002, it became my favorite service for clandestine file sharing. In late 2007, it was the most popular file sharing network on the Internet with an estimated market share of more than 40%. But nowadays, BitTorrent steals the limelight. How did that happen ?

Gnutella has structural scalability limitations that even its creator acknowledged from the very start. Over the years, major improvements were introduced, but search horizon and network size remain intrinsic limitations due to search traffic. On the other hand, BitTorrent outsourced much of the search and indexing of files to torrent web sites, only handling the actual distribution of data within the client.

Providing search across the indexes requires other parties to provide them, but that architectural constraint has paradoxically become a key driver of BitTorrent’s popularity by providing a simple business model. Ernesto at TorrentFreak explains that easy monetization explains the ubiquity of indexes : “BitTorrent sites can generate some serious revenue, enough to sustain the site and make a decent living. In general, ad rates per impression are very low, but thanks to the huge amounts of traffic it quickly adds up. This money aspect has made it possible for sites to thrive, and has also lured many gold diggers into starting a torrent site over the years“.

With commercial interests comes spam and legal vulnerabilities – so I feel much more comfortable knowing that decentralized protocols exist to provide resilience towards the censorship that lurks over us in the dark, waiting for us to become complacently reliant on centralized resources. Happy birthday Gnutella !

Yesterday, while Google Buzz was still only a rumor, I felt that there was a slight likelyhood that Google’s entry into the microblogging field would support decentralized interoperability using the OpenMicroBlogging protocol pioneered by the Status.net open source micro messaging platform. I was wrong about that, but it was quite a long shot… Speculation is a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it !

I am also surprised that there is no Twitter API, but there is plenty of other protocols on the menu that should keep us quite happy. There is already the Social Graph API, the PubSubHubbub push protocol and of course Atom Syndication and the RSS format – with the MediaRSS extension. But much more interesting is the Google Buzz documentation mention that “Over the next several months Google Buzz will introduce an API for developers, including full/read write support for posts with the Atom Publishing Protocol, rich activity notification with Activity Streams, delegated authorization with OAuth, federated comments and activities with Salmon, distributed profile and contact information with WebFinger, and much, much more“. So with all that available to third parties we may even be able to interact with Google’s content without having to deal with Gmail whose rampant portalization makes me dislike it almost as much as Facebook and Yahoo.

I’m particularly excited about Salmon, a protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources. For now I wonder about the compared utilities of Google Buzz and FriendFeed, but once Salmon is widely implemented it won’t matter where the comments are contributed : they will percolate everywhere and the conversation shall be united again !

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal mentioned by ReadWriteWeb, Google might be offering a microblogging service as soon as this week.

When Google opened Google Talk, they opened the service to XMPP/Jabber federation. As a new entrant in a saturated market, opening up is the logical move.

The collaborative messaging field as a whole cannot be considered saturated but, while it is still evolving very fast, the needs of the early adopter segment are now well served by entrenched offers such as Twitter and Facebook. Touching them will require an alternative strategy – and that may lead to opening as a way to offer attractive value to users and service providers alike.

So maybe we can cling on a faint hope that Google’s entry into the microblogging field will support decentralized interoperability using the OpenMicroBlogging protocol pioneered by the Status.net open source micro messaging platform. Shall we take a bet ?

Don’t you love bar talk speculation based on anonymous rumors ?

The quality of OpenStreetMap‘s work speaks for itself, but it seems that we need to speak about it too – especially now that Google is attempting to to appear as holding the moral high ground by using terms such as “citizen cartographer” that they rob of its meaning by conveniently forgetting to mention the license under which the contributed data is held. But in the eye of the public, the $50000 UNICEF donation to the  home country of the winner of the Map Maker Global Challenge lets them appear as charitable citizens.

We need to explain why it is a fraud, so that motivated aspiring cartographers are not tempted to give away their souls for free. I could understand that they sell it, but giving it to Google for free is a bit too much – we must tell them. I’m pretty sure that good geographic data available to anyone for free will do more for the least developed communities than a 50k USD grant.

Take Map Kibera for example :

“Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, widely known as Africa’s largest slum, remains a blank spot on the map. Without basic knowledge of the geography and resources of Kibera it is impossible to have an informed discussion on how to improve the lives of residents. This November, young Kiberans create the first public digital map of their own community”.

And they did it with OpenStreetMap. To the million of people living in this former terra incognita with no chance of profiting a major mapping provider, how much do you think having at last a platform for services that require geographical information without having to pay Google or remain within the limits of the uses permitted by its license is worth ?

I answered this piece at ReadWriteWeb and I suggest that you keep an eye for opportunities to answer this sort of propaganda against libre mapping.

As Ars Technica announced three days ago,  Intel’s 2009 launch of its ambitious Larrabee GPU’s has been canceled : “The project has suffered a final delay that proved fatal to its graphics ambitions, so Intel will put the hardware out as a development platform for graphics and high-performance computing. But Intel’s plans to make a GPU aren’t dead; they’ve just been reset, with more news to come next year“.

I can’t wait for more news about that radical new architecture from the only major graphics hardware vendor that has a long history of producing or commissioning open source drivers for its graphics chips.

But what are we excited about ? In a nutshell : automatic vectorization for parallel execution of any known code graph with no data dependencies between iterations is why Larabee is about. That means that in many cases, the developper can take his existing code and get easy parallel execution for free.

Since I’m an utter layman in the field of processor architecture, I’ll let you read the word of Tim Sweeney of Epic Games, who provided a great deal of input into the design of LRBni. He sums up the big picture a little more eloquently and I found him cited in Michael Abrash’s April 2009 article in Dr. Dobb’s – “A First Look at the Larrabee New Instructions” :

Larrabee enables GPU-class performance on a fully general x86 CPU; most importantly, it does so in a way that is useful for a broad spectrum of applications and that is easy for developers to use. The key is that Larrabee instructions are “vector-complete.”

More precisely: Any loop written in a traditional programming language can be vectorized, to execute 16 iterations of the loop in parallel on Larrabee vector units, provided the loop body meets the following criteria:

• Its call graph is statically known.
• There are no data dependencies between iterations.

Shading languages like HLSL are constrained so developers can only write code meeting those criteria, guaranteeing a GPU can always shade multiple pixels in parallel. But vectorization is a much more general technology, applicable to any such loops written in any language.

This works on Larrabee because every traditional programming element — arithmetic, loops, function calls, memory reads, memory writes — has a corresponding translation to Larrabee vector instructions running it on 16 data elements simultaneously. You have: integer and floating point vector arithmetic; scatter/gather for vectorized memory operations; and comparison, masking, and merging instructions for conditionals.

This wasn’t the case with MMX, SSE and Altivec. They supported vector arithmetic, but could only read and write data from contiguous locations in memory, rather than random-access as Larrabee. So SSE was only useful for operations on data that was naturally vector-like: RGBA colors, XYZW coordinates in 3D graphics, and so on. The Larrabee instructions are suitable for vectorizing any code meeting the conditions above, even when the code was not written to operate on vector-like quantities. It can benefit every type of application!

A vital component of this is Intel’s vectorizing C++ compiler. Developers hate having to write assembly language code, and even dislike writing C++ code using SSE intrinsics, because the programming style is awkward and time-consuming. Few developers can dedicate resources to doing that, whereas Larrabee is easy; the vectorization process can be made automatic and compatible with existing code.

With cores proliferating on an more CPUs every day and an embarrassing number of applications not taking advantage of it, bringing easy parallel execution to the masses means a lot. That’s why I’m eager to see what Intel has in store for the future of Larrabee.

Last week-end I ventured outside of the big city, in the land where cells are measured in kilometres and where signal is not taken for granted. So what surprised me was not to have to deal with only the faint echo of the network’s signal. Cell of origin location on the other hand was quite a surprising feature in that environment : sometimes it works with an error consistent with the cellular environment, but often the next moment it estimated my position to be way further from where I actually was – 34 kilometres west in this case.

The explanation is obvious : my terminal chose to attach to the cell it received best. Being physically located on a coastal escarpment, it had line of sight to a cell on the opposite side of the bay – 34 kilometres away.

But being on the edge of a very well covered area, it was regularly handed over to a nearby cell. In spite of the handover damping algorithms, this resulted in a continuous flip-flop nicely illustrated by this extract of my Brightkite account’s checkin log :

Isn’t that ugly ? Of course I won’t comment on this network’s radio planning and cell neighbourhood settings – I promised my employer I will not mention him anymore. But there has to be a better way and my device can definitely do something about it : it is already equipped with the necessary hardware.

Instant matter displacement being highly unlikely for the time being, we can posit that sudden movement of kilometre-scale distances will result in the corresponding acceleration. And the HTC Magic sports a three axis accelerometer. At that point, inertial navigation immediately springs to mind. Others have thought about it before, and it could be very useful right now for indoor navigation. But limitations seem to put that goal slightly out of reach for now.

But for our purposes the hardware at hand would be entirely sufficient : we just need rough dead reckoning to check that the cell ID change is congruent with recent acceleration. With low quality of the acceleration measurement, using it as a positioning source is out of question, but it would be suitable for dampening the flip flopping as the terminal suffers the vagaries of handover to distant cells.

So who will be the first to refine cell of origin positioning using inertial navigation as a sanity check ?

Five months have elapsed since that first week-end when my encounter with Android was a severe case of culture shock. With significant daily experience of the device, I can now form a more mature judgement of its capabilities and its potential – of course from my own highly subjective point of view.

I still hate having to use Google Calendar and Google Contacts for synchronization.  I hope that SyncML synchronization will appear in the future, make Android a better desktop citizen and provide more choice of end points. Meanwhile I use Google. With that out of the way, let’s move on to my impressions of Android itself.

I am grateful for features such as a decent web browser on a mobile device, for a working albeit half baked packaging and distribution system, and for Google Maps which I consider both a superlative application in its own right and the current killer albeit proprietary infrastructure for location enabled applications. But the rigidly simple interface that forces behaviours upon its user feels like a straitjacket : the overbearing feeling when using Android is that its designers have decided that simplicity is to be preserved at all costs regardless of what the user prefers.

Why can’t I select a smaller font for my list items ? Would a parameter somewhere in a customization menu add too much complication ? Why won’t you show me the raw configuration data ? Is it absolutely necessary to arbitrarily limit the number of virtual desktops to three ? From the point of a user who is just getting acquainted with such a powerful platform, those are puzzling questions.

I still don’t like the Android ‘s logic, and moreover I still don’t quite understand it. Of course I manage to use that system, but after five month of daily use it still does not feel natural. Maybe it is just a skin-deep issue or maybe I am just not the target audience – but some features are definitely backwards – package management for example. For starters, the “My Downloads” list is not ordered alphabetically nor in any apparently meaningful order. Then for each upgradeable package, one must first browse to the package, then manually trigger the upgrade package, then acknowledge system privileges the upgraded package and finally clear the download notification and the update notification. Is this a joke ? This almost matches the tediousness of upgrading Windows software – an impressive feat considering that the foundations of Android package management seem serious enough. Where is my APT ?

Like any new user on a prosperous enough system, I am lost in choices – but that is an embarrassment of riches. Nevertheless, I wonder why basics such as a task manager are not installed by default. In classic Unix spirit, even the most basic system utilities are independent applications. But what is bearable and even satisfying on a system with a decent shell and package management with dependencies becomes torture when installing a package is so clumsy and upgrading it so tedious.

Tediousness in package management in particular and user interaction in general makes taming the beast an experience in frustration. When installing a bunch of competing applications and testing them takes time and effort. Experimenting is not the pleasure it normally is on a Linux system. The lack of decent text entry compounds the feeling. Clumsy text selection makes cut and paste a significant effort – something Palm did make quick, easy and painless more than ten years ago. Not implementing pointer-driven selection – what were the developers thinking ?

PIM integration has not progressed much. For a given contact, there is no way to look at a communications log that spans mail, SMS and telephony: each of them is its own separate universe. There is no way to have a list of meetings with a given contact or at given location.

But there basic functionality has been omitted too. For example when adding a phone number to an existing contact, search is disabled – you have to scroll all the way to the contact. There is no way to search the SMS archive and SMS to multiple recipients is an exercise left to applications.

Palm OS may have been unstable, incapable of contemporary operating system features, offering only basic functionality and generally way past its shelf date. But in the mind of users, it remains the benchmark against which all PIM systems are judged. And to this day I still don’t see anything beating Palm OS on its home turf of  PIM core features and basic usability.

Palm OS was a poster child for responsiveness, but on the Android everything takes time – even after I have identified and killed the various errant applications that make it even slower. Actually, the system is very fast and capable of feats such as full-motion video that were far beyond the reach of the Palm OS. But the interaction is spoilt by gratuitous use of animations for everything. Animations are useful for graphically hinting the novice user about what is going on – but then hey are only a drag. But please let me disable animations as I do on every desktop I use !

The choice of a virtual keyboard is my own mistake and I am now aware that I need a physical keyboard. After five months, I can now use the virtual keyboard with enough speed and precision for comfortable entry of a couple of sentences. But beyond that it is tiring and feels too clumsy for any meaningful work. This is a major problem for me – text entry is my daily bread and butter. I long for the Treo‘s keyboard or even the one on the Nokia E71 – they offered a great compromise of typing speed and compacity. And no multitouch on the soft keyboard means no keyboard shortcuts which renders many console applications unusable – sorry Emacs users.

The applications offering is still young and I cannot blame it for needing time to expand and mature. I also still need to familiarize myself with Android culture an develop the right habits to find my way instinctively and be more productive. After five months, we are getting there – one handed navigation has been done right. But I still believe that a large part of the user interface conventions used on the Android does not match the expectations for general computing.

It seems like everything has been meticulously designed to bury under a thick layer of Dalvik and Google plaster anything that could remind anyone of Unix. It is very frustrating to know that there is a Linux kernel under all that, and yet to suffer wading knee-deep in the marshes of toyland. The more I use Android an study it, the more I feel that Linux is a mere hardware abstraction layer and the POSIX world a distant memory. This is not the droid I’m looking for.

As the Geohack template used by Wikipedia for geographical locations attests (see Paris for example) there are many map publishing services on the Web. But almost all of them rely on an oligopoly of geographical data suppliers among whom AND, Navteq and Teleatlas dominate and absorb a large proportion of the profit in the geographical information value chain :

“If you purchase a TomTom, approximately 20-30% of that cost goes to Tele Atlas who licenses the maps that TomTom and many other hardware manufacturers use. Part of that charge is because Tele Atlas itself, and the company’s main rival Navteq, have to buy the data from national mapping agencies in the first place, like the Ordance Survey, and then stitch all the information together. Hence the consumer having to pay on a number of levels”.

And yet, geographical data is a fundamental pillar of our information infrastructure. A few years ago the realm of specialized geographic information systems, geography is nowadays a pervasive dimension of about every sort of service. When something becomes an essential feature of our lives, nothing short of freedom is acceptable. What happens when that freedom requires collecting humongous amounts of data and when oligopolistic actors strive to keep control and profits to themselves ? Free software collaboration and  distributed data collection of course !

Andrew Ross gives a nice summary of why free geographical data is the way of the future :

“The tremendous cost of producing the maps necessitates that these firms have very restrictive licenses to protect their business models selling the data. As a result, there are many things you can’t do with the data.

[..] The reason why OpenStreetMap will win in the end and likely obviate the need for commercial map data is that the costs and risks associated with mapping are shared. Conversely, for Navteq and TeleAtlas, the costs born by these companies are passed on to their customers. Once their customers discover OpenStreetMap data is in some cases superior, or more importantly – they can contribute to it and the license allows them to use the data for nearly any purpose – map data then becomes commodity”.

The proprietary players are aware of that trend, and they try to profit from the users who wish to correct the many errors contained in the data they publish. But why would anyone contribute something, only to see it monopolized by the editor who won’t let you do what you want with it ? If I make the effort of contributing carefully collected data, I want it to benefit as many people as possible – not just someone who will keep it for his own profit.

Access to satellite imagery will remain an insurmountable barrier in the long term, but soon the map layers will be ours to play with – and that is enough to open the whole world of mapping. Like a downhill snowball, the OpenStreetMap data set growth is accelerating fast and attracting a thriving community that now includes professional and institutional users and contributors. Over its first five years, the Wikipedia-like online map project has delivered great results – and developed even greater ambitions.

I have started to contribute to OpenStreetmap – I feel great satisfaction at mapping the world for fun and for our common good. Owning the map feels good ! You can do it too – it is easy, especially if you are the sort of person who often logs tracks with a GPS receiver. OpenStreetMap’s infrastructure is quite impressive – everything you need is already out there waiting for your contribution, including very nice editors – and there is one for Android too.

If you just want to add your grain of sand to the heap, reporting bugs and naming the places in your favourite neighbourhood are great ways to help build maps that benefit all of us.  Contributing to the map is like giving directions to strangers lost in your neighbourhood – except that you are giving directions to many strangers at once.

If you are not yet convinced, take a look a the map – isn’t it beautiful ? And it is only one of the many ways to render OpenStreetMap data. Wanna make a cycling map with it ? Yes we can ! That is the whole point of the project – we can do whatever we want with the data, free in every way.

And anyone can decide he wants his neighbourhood part of the worldmap, even if no self-respecting for-profit enterprise will ever consider loosing money on such endeavour :

“OpenStreetMap has better coverage in some niche spaces than other mapping tools, making it very attractive resource for international development organizations. Want proof ? [..] we looked at capital cities in several countries that have been in the news lately for ongoing humanitarian situations – Zimbabwe, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For two our of the three, Mogadishu and Kinshasa, there is simply no contest – OpenStreetMap is way ahead of the others in both coverage and in the level of detail. OpenStreetMap and Google Maps are comparable in Harare. The data available through Microsoft’s Virtual Earth lagged way behind in all three”.

Among other places, I was amazed at the level of detail provided to the map of Ouagadougou. Aren’t these exciting times for cartography ?

I sometimes get requests for help. Often they are smart questions and I’m actually somewhat relevant to them – for example questions about a script or an article that I wrote, or an experience I had. But sometimes it is not the case. This message I received today is particularly bad, so I thought it might be a public service to share it as an example of what not to do. This one is especially appalling because it comes not from some wet-behind-the-ears teenager to whom I would gracefully have issued a few hints and a gentle reminder of online manners, but from the inside of the corporate network of Wipro – a company that has a reputation as a global IT services organization.

From: xxxxxx.kumar@wipro.com
Subject: Perl
To: jim@liotier.org
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:22:32 +0530

Hi Jim,

Could you please help me in finding out the solution for my problem. Iam new to perl i have tried all the options whatever i learned but couldn’t solve. Please revert me if you know the solution.

Here is the problem follows:

Below is the XML in which you could see the lines with AssemblyVersion and Version in each record i need to modify these values depending on some values which i get from perforce. Assuming hardcode values as of now need to change those values upon user wish using Perl. Upon changing these lines it should effect in existing file .

<FileCopyInfo>
<Entries>
<Entry>
<DeviceName>sss</DeviceName>
<ModuleName>general1</ModuleName>
<AssemblyVersion>9</AssemblyVersion>
<Language>default</Language>
<Version>9</Version>
<DisplayName>Speech – eneral</DisplayName>
<UpdateOnlyExisting>false</UpdateOnlyExisting>
</Entry>
<Entry>
<DeviceName>sss</DeviceName>
<ModuleName>general2</ModuleName>
<AssemblyVersion>9</AssemblyVersion>
<Language>default</Language>
<Version>9</Version>
<DisplayName>Speech – recog de_DE</DisplayName>
<UpdateOnlyExisting>false</UpdateOnlyExisting>
</Entry>
</Entries>
</FileCopyInfo>

Thanks & Regards,
Xxxxxxx

From what I gather from the convoluted use of approximative English, the problem is about changing the value of two XML elements in a file. Can anyone believe that this guy has even tried to solve this simple problem on his own ? It is even sadder that he tries to obtain answers by spamming random strangers by mail, soliciting answers that will never be shared with the wider world. Least he could have done is posting his message on a Perl forum so that others with similar questions can benefit from the eventual answer.

Had he performed even a cursory Google search, he would have found that one of his compatriots has done exactly that and gotten three different answers to a similar question, letting him choose between XML::Twig, XML::Rules and XML::Simple. These are just three – but the Perl XML FAQ enumerates at least a dozen CPAN modules for manipulating XML data. The documentation for any of them or the examples in the FAQ would also have put him on the track to a solution.

Everyone can be clueless about something and learning is a fundamental activity for our whole lives. But everyone can do some research, read the FAQ, ask smart questions and make sure that the whole community benefits from their learning process, especially as it doe not cost any additional effort. Knowledge capitalization within a community of practice is such an easy process with benefits for everyone involved that I don’t understand why it is not a universally drilled reflex.

The funny part is that while I’m ranting about it and wielding the cluebat over the head of some random interloper, I realize that the same sort of behavior is standard internally in a very large company I know very well, because a repository of community knowledge has not even been made available for those willing to share. Is there any online community without a wiki and a forum ?

Ten years ago I was beginning to believe that consulting opportunities in knowledge management were drying up because knowledge management skills had entered the mainstream and percolated everywhere. I could not be more wrong : ten years of awesome technological progress have proved beyond reasonable doubt that technology and tools are a peripheral issue : knowledge management is about the people and their attitudes; it is about cooperation. This was the introduction of my graduation paper ten years ago, with the prisoner’s dilemma illustrating cooperation issues – and it is today still as valid as ever.

Chat is supposed to be realtime conversation – and it often is. But just as some corporate victims live in Outlook (that abortion that Microsoft shoves down user’s throat as an excuse for a mail client) some fellow geeks live with an IRC screen at hand. Those people use IRC for realtime conversation, but not only. Soliloquy is widespread, and having a client with at least half a dozen tabs that are as many parallel conversations is a common occurence. IRC users were microblogging before the term was coined and web interfaces imagined.

People come to IRC channels such as project channels to meet the whole group. But just as often they come there to hang out with acquaintances, which they find spread accross various channels. Wouldn’t it be great if each user could have his own channel with just his friends ? This is what microblogging is : a people aggregator, just as any feed aggregator but for the people you want to follow.

I have had a hard time so far trying to convince my IRC addicted friends that we should use a Jabber MUC chat room in lieu of our usual IRC channel. Jabber MUC is superior to IRC in every way possible, but as much as we like to rail against the common user’s inertia to technological adoption, we are sometimes no better.

I believe that the problem was that Jabber MUC provides only marginal incremental improvement to their usage. And adopting a microblogging service is a huge stretch from their current use cases. I have therefore long been dreaming about a chat interface to microblogging that would meld the social power of microblogging and common chat usage patterns into a workable migration path for my IRC addicted friends. And there it is :

Neat isn’t it ? Jack Moffit mentioned it evasively in his article about filtering the realtime web and it piqued my curiosity.

From a user’s point of view, Identichat is about joining the Jabber multi-user chat at your_identica_user_name@identichat.prosody.im and you’ll immediately find yourself in a standard MUC room where the participants are your Identi.ca subscribers. The conversation is the microblogging stream that you would normally get at Identi.ca.

If you try to enter a notice, a help message in the chat window points out that ’You can register using your identica account by sending !register username password’. Do that – not ‘/register’ as I mistakenly typed out of IRC habit – and you are set to use Identi.ca as any chat tool.

How is that different from a graphical Laconica client ? It is not a Laconica client, it is plain XMPP MUC that about every decent XMPP client supports. As you may know, there are Jabber clients for about every platform you can imagine including mobiles – even some like Mcabber which provide a user interface which will make the console IRC user feel at home. Identichat is not just another client, it is a gateway to a whole world of existing XMPP clients so that every user can use his favorite.

Identichat will help Laconica by eroding chat user’s resistance to change. And it could also foster new uses of microblogging as a thick client enables considerably accelerated interaction compared to a web interface. For now it could be faster – the turnaround latency is perceptible compared to IRC or XMPP MUC, and a helpful “line too long” message would be better than “Send failed : error 406″. But I’m nitpicking : Identichat is a wonderful tool that gives new faces to the microblogging infrastructure. An infrastructure that can show different faces to different classes of users has a great future !

I just turned the last page of “Singularity Sky” by Charles Stross. I was awestruck by the telephone rain and went on to finish the book the same night. That was a very unreasonable encroachment on my sleep time but I needed a dose of space opera.

I expected some exploration of post-humanism and I got all that. Socio-technological musings kept me entertained too. There were a few obvious winks at other authors, and probably quite a few others I missed. The universe felt a bit like Vernor Vinge‘s. Readers of Iain Banks will find themselves right at home too, although Charles Stross‘ writing is quite a bit less intricate and the characters less developed. But if like me you are fascinated by the imminence of the technological singularity and appreciate science-fiction thrillers, this book is a nice read.

I have become a user of Brightkite, a service that provides situational awareness in the geographical context. Once its relationship to user location information sources such as Fire Eagle improve, it may become a very nice tool, especially in mobile use cases where location reporting may be partly automated.

But even if they add technical value in the growing world of geographically aware applications, theses services are actually not innovative at the functional level. For example, in the ham radio universe, APRS is already a great system for real time tactical digital communications of information of immediate value in the local area – which includes among other things the position of the participating stations. And there is also TCAS, which interrogates surrounding aircrafts about their positions, and AIS which broadcasts ship positions and enables the entertaining Vessel Traffic Services such as the one provided by MarineTraffic. All these radio based systems broadcast in the clear and are not satisfying the privacy requirements of a personal eventing service. But that problem has also been solved by the Blue Force Tracker which even though it is still a work in progress has already changed how a chaotic battlefield is perceived by its participants.

“Where am I, and where are my friends ?” is not only the soldier’s critical information – it is also an important component of our social lives, witness the thriving landscape of geosocial networking. Geographic location is a fundamental enabler : we are physically embodied and the perimeter of location based services actually encompasses anything concerning our physical presence. So we can’t let physical location services escape our control. Fire Eagle may be practical for now, but we need to make geographical information part of the basic infrastructure under our control and available on a standardized, open and decentralized basis. The good news is that much thoughts have already been invested into that problem.

Physical location is part of our presence, and as you may have guessed by now, this means XMPP comes to the rescue ! We have XEP-0080 – User Location, an XMPP extension which is currently a XMPP Foundation Draft Standard (implementations are encouraged and the protocol is appropriate for deployment in production systems, but some changes to the protocol are possible before it becomes a Final Standard – as good as a draft standard RFC and therefore good enough for early adopter use). It is meant to be communicated and transported by means of Publish-Subscribe or the subset thereof specified in Personal Eventing via Pubsub. It may also be provided as an extension of plain vanilla <presence/> but that is quite a crude way to do it compared to the Publish-Subscribe goodness.

The rest of the work is left to the XMPP client. Of course, the client can show them on a map, just as Brightkite currently does. But I can also easily imagine an instant messaging contact list on my PDA where one of the contact groups is “contacts near me”. I would love to have Psi do that…

Some people notice I am quite dogmatic about open networks. And they are right : to me, open is everything and the rest is details. But even my zeal has its limits : I don’t gratuitously shove tools in the face of people who can’t use them in practical conditions. I have been advocating jabber among my technically minded friends since 2001 and running my own server since 2003, but it took Google joining the XMPP network in 2006 to actually make it a viable option for pushing open instant messaging to the masses of people I don’t want to support myself. Before that I could understand the necessity for joining proprietary networks and run multiprotocol clients to reach people I could not decently drag to Jabber or IRC. But now I can tell them that getting presence information and instant messenging from me is just a Google account away – and since it is a mainstream service offered by an established and well known service provider they can hardly anymore label me a techno-excentric for using it. So – no I will not join your proprietary instant messaging network.

Today we have the same situation with social networking. And while the technological prerequisites for open microblogging have been almost there for a while, they have not yet cristalized into something that can be fed to the masses. That day will come – and we are all pushing toward it. Until then, I have a Facebook profile. But soon I know that I’ll be able to tell the world that my social networking tool is my blog, or whatever other tools I fancy moving to and from thanks to data portability efforts. And it’ll be easy for others to do the same because interoperable services will blossom at the hands of mass-market providers – maybe even Facebook if they ever reach enlightenment. And when that is about to be ready for massive adoption, you know where I’ll be – and you know where I’ll not be anymore !

To me there is an element of religion in those choices. But the techno-apathetic average user can make the same choices out of pure self-interest. If there are a number of comparable offerings on the market, one of which lets the buyer choose between different suppliers and move between them at will, you can bet that the one-time cost of moving away from the proprietary offering will be more than offset by the future value of the open solution. If we look at the history of technologies, examples of such migrations are plenty. Let’s just take e-mail for example : what is the current weight of closed mail systems ? They still exist, but they are insignificant niches and many of them use e-mail for notification…

Stumbing on an article by Jeremy Allison about why Free software and open formats are increasingly important as our lives are turning digital, I was suprised to read the following :

If I haven’t convinced you yet that Linux is going to take over the appliance world, I strongly suggest you look at Sony’s web site. There you can find a page full of television models going back to 2003, all of which run on Linux (for those essential moments when you must have the source code to your television, naturally).

Sony is such a big group that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing – so I am not surprised that Free software is being used, although Sony‘s attitude toward it has had both highs and lows in the past.

Free software on a television is quite intriguing. Some of those televisions not only run the kernel, but also well known user environments such Bash, Busybox and Freetype. Would they be powerful enough to run a thin client with RDP or X11 ? Could they even run a media player ? I would not be suprised : as far back as 2003, Sony President and Chief Operating Officer Kunitake Ando said that “the TV will replace the PC as the center of online entertainment, running on a Linux-based platform for connected home electronics devices“. If Sony implements that vision with adequate hardware running Free software, Sony televisions may one day be a tinkerer’s device of choice for the home entertainment projects that currently most often use a dedicated computer to display on the television screen.

I just realized that Chrome does DNS prefectching and I would like to have that in a Firefox plugin. On fast links and older versions of Firefox, I used to enjoy Fasterfox – a plugin that among other speed optimizations prefetches link targets. Of course, that is a network intensive process that may not be suitable for general consumption. But proactive DNS resolving is a pretty harmless tweak that I would settle for – and the Fasterfox precedent shows that it is quite doable. Of course the paranoid prudent among us won’t like it, but that segment of the population knows how to turn off that sort of feature.