The things geeks think about....

2009-07-14T16:01:00+01:00

I've been thinking about the whole Twitter* thing recently having been trying it out for two months or so. I haven't much to add to my previous analysis other than spam will continue to be a problem in this new landscape and risks bogging it down.

From the start of the experiment I was keen to ensure I was insulated from the vagaries of corporate idea development. This is why I micro-blog on many different networks and prefer sites using open APIs that are compatible with free software. Unfortunately I walked into that trap when I renewed my subscription to last.fm earlier this year.

My current preferred music player is Banshee which had admirable support for last.fm until recently. Unfortunately without the original founders and new corporate interests it looks like it will be hard to get a license key for FLOSS software, being by it's very nature open to inspection. As soon as you need a document signing on behalf of a loose knit community things get tricky. I do have a fall back solution of running the Flash radio player in my browser but it's not the ideal solution as it puts me at the mercy of Adobe's Linux support and of course isn't open source**.

I think it is time to break out the scripts and start importing data into libre.fm just in case the rules get changed again.

* Other micro-blogging sites are available but I suspect #tweets have won the naming race.
** I know it's a shock I'm running Flash. It was all iPlayer's fault. I try gnash every now and again but I can't get even get YouTube to work though it is supposed to.

Alex's Adventures on the Infobahn - microblogging

The things geeks think about....