I think there are some fundamental branding issues that need to be addressed before Laconica can hit critical mass. Or rather OpenMicroBlogging can hit critical mass.
The obvious comparison is to twitter, and even the Australian PM (KevinRuddPM) understands what it means to "follow someone on Twitter", a brilliant measure of success if there ever was one. However twitter is both a platform, product and a service, the branding is easy for a user to understand. What is required is that branding of an OpenMicroBlogging service is so obvious that anybody on identi.ca, twitarmy, etc just know that they can subscribe to each other, not by looking at some list, but by brand recognition. Jabber is probably a good comparison (even though it hasn't quite hit KevinRuddPM level of mainstream), "Do you have a Jabber account?", and the answer in my case is my Google Talk details, the fact where my account is held is not important. The world before SMTP dominance (for the older ones in the audience) is another example, it wasn't sufficient to ask if somebody had email, you needed to know if your mail system could email the recipient's system. So what I see is needed is a brand name for OpenMicroBlogging compatible services, (I'll just call that brand OMB for now), as you should be able to say something like "Did you see that the Australian PM is using OMB?", "Did you see what Leo Laporte posted on his OMB, it is at http://army.twit.tv/leo";. "Follow me on OMB:service/user". Where I have my account, Whether it uses Laconica is not important, can't be important - at least not if KevinRuddPM is ever going to use it. Hmm, maybe laconica-dev is not the right place for this, as it is far removed from the source-code of Laconica, I am sure you will let me know...:-) Pflodo Peter Flodin _______________________________________________ Laconica-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.laconi.ca/mailman/listinfo/laconica-dev
