(2007-06-27) Twitter Gram

Dave Winer feels constrained by the small-size Twitter message. So he's working on PayLoad delivery, and calling it a TwitterGram.

He's also thinking about Twitter and a Digital Identity service for an Open Social Networking Model.

• What's missing: The ability for any app to store information associated with an account. Each person defines a NameSpace that can connect up to any other person with a namespace. At the intersection between two users could be (I'm channeling Marc Canter here) an appointment, a photograph (or many), a movie, a weblog, you name it. Marc could decide that this post belongs in his namespace in addition to mine (where the original lives). That's what the permalink is for.

• Paolo Valdemarin on the issues around defining types of relationships in an Open Social Networking Model.

He connects this to his RSS Platform experience. So if TwitterGrams take off, and I think they might, I'm going to have to put some software in the middle of it. A new branch to the coral reef that Twitter is. And then people can build compatible front ends, and compatible back ends, and everybody will be happy. Hopefully when the dust settles, if there is something to this, I'll be left with something of value to reward me for the risk and effort (and the years of barking up fruitless trees and chasing down blind aleys, and convincing people they should listen to me).

He has a Web Service running. Only XmlRpc right now, plans to add ReST.

And the WebApp is up.

Aug update: sometime it became incredibly easy