Funny. This is why I dislike comment moderation and what I like about Pivotal Tracker. Now, I have a fancy word to use. That will make me sound very intellectual

I guess McAfee doesn't subscribe to the theory that sustained, uninterrupted thinking is better than multi-tasking. I do subscribe to that theory, which is why I drop out of Twitter, email, IM and other distractions when I need to think big thoughts.

That's a post for another time.

“Frictionless means that users perceive it to be easy to participate in the platform, and can do so with very little time or effort. One measure of friction is the total time required between having an idea for a contribution (while sitting in front of the computer, carrying the iPhone, etc.) and the appearance of that contribution on the platform.

Sign-ins, navigation through many web pages, and clunky user interfaces are all perceived as hurdles by a platform’s potential users, and increase friction. So does the need to massage a contribution like a blog post to look like it wasn’t put together by a complete hack. I can already tell, for example, that I’m going to post to this version of my blog more often than I did when it was hosted under the hbs.edu domain name and used a different and clunkier interface for posting. I felt like I had to tweak each entry for a long time to make it look OK, and it was a disincentive to post.

Tweetdeck, on the other hand, makes contribution to Twitter pretty frictionless. It sits on my desktop as a separate client, and I zip over to it whenever I have an idea. It’s quick and painless to send a standard tweet, a reply, a direct message, or a retweet, and to shorten and include a URL. With Tweetdeck I can convince myself to take a timeout from my deep academic thinking (coughcough) more often because each timeout is so short – literally just a matter of seconds.”

I ran into this a lot in consulting, when replacing a mainframe-based terminal system with a GUI. Adding the need for a mouse to tasks that used to be fully keyboard-based threw people for a loop. I don't think they *preferred* the keyboard way, it was just what they were accustomed to using.

I love TED talks, will definitely take a look.

There is a Twitter-by-voice app, TwiterFone. I covered it here about a year ago. If you want to try it, get on their invites list or ping @patphelan. Overall, I don't use it as much as I thought I would, but it's very handy if you're on the go a lot. Plus, it's voice recognition makes for some unintentional comedy.

 I recently saw a short video on TED about “Sixth Sense” showing a mashup of capabilities using a phone, web cam and mirror (that you carry) to do some fascinating things.  Worth a watch.

Combined with this discussion, it makes me wonder if the future (or next step) for Twitter isn't a voice version that uses something like GoogleVoice so that you don't even have to key-in the message, just say it.  Or maybe it's voice recognition on the phone?  You know, pick the icon, say your tweet and hit send.  just a thought…

BTW, does laconi.ca run on Oracle? I can't recall.

There's no need to defend laconi.ca or identi.ca vs. Twitter to me. I met Evan last year at Beer and Blog during OSCON, and I'm an open source guy. I'm into what he's doing with that project.

Again, not the point of this post, so I'll amend it accordingly.

Twitter's refusal to participate in OMB and share their source code with the world so we can address the performance and scalability problems hardly make it open.

Can you download Twitter and install it behind the corporate firewall ? No.

Can you implement Twitter with an Oracle back-end or modify it to alk to OraTweet ? No.

If you are mixing the words 'µblogging and openness' in the same sentence…try 'Laconi.ca'