Closed Bug 443224 Opened 17 years ago Closed 9 years ago

Micro-Planet for Twitter

Categories

(Websites :: planet.mozilla.org, enhancement)

Product:
Websites
Component:
planet.mozilla.org
Type:
enhancement
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: tom, Unassigned)

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URL
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(1 file)

I've created a mockup of what this might look like.
304.11 KB, image/png
Details
A lot of the Mozilla people have Twitter accounts. Lucy loves the idea of a planet like site for these. I made a crummy one here (for moznet users initially, not only Mozilla staff, but it is now mostly Mozilla staff), the problem is it only shows the users last update, which is not very planet like. http://crowdstatus.com/moznetcrowd.aspx A very few Mozilla staffers have private accounts so RSS would fail here, a bot would have to be created using the API to 'follow' them and pull out only tweets they'd want to make public. I'd suggest just showing tweets that contain the words Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, or other keywords.
what about a friendfeed room or a whoisi entry. I'm actually very interested in making some changes to the Mozilla community aggregation work that we've got going at planet and part of that is that I'd like to find a way make the faster-paced micro-blogging conversation visible.
There's always been discussion about planet's scope as a tool to get to know the community socially as well. I think leaving them unfiltered would be just as good. The logistics would be interesting, this could probably be done pretty simply by creating a planet twitter account and having it follow people.
For what it's worth a new open-source twitter-alike just started up. identi.ca -- given how unreliable twitter is these days, i'm not sure i'd put all my eggs in that particular basket :)
and I'm actually interested in more than another aggregator. I really want to see the conversation growing so things like friendfeeds rooms with commenting and the ability to grow the room by adding new streams are really attractive. Not attractive is that it requires an account to participate. Over the next couple of months, I'd like to start experimenting. I'm also working with SethB to construct a community survey to guage what our current planet audience is doing and why/how they use it, what they'd like to get out of it, etc. That should help inform our decision making.
dria: It's not like the hosting for the blogs on planet is reliable, either. And I suppose other services could be included in the Micro-Planet, no need to limit to one source. asa: I thought about the friendfeed thing, I need to look into how that works. Don't want to make it so anyone can pretend to be part of Mozilla, though. (Also, could you post a tweet so I can add you to crowdsource? it can't add people who have never tweeted)
ccing Chris Blizzard to get feedback on Asa Dotzler's statement in comment 1
(In reply to comment #4) > and I'm actually interested in more than another aggregator. I really want to > see the conversation growing so things like friendfeeds rooms with commenting > and the ability to grow the room by adding new streams are really attractive. > Not attractive is that it requires an account to participate. > We have so many places to discuss things already though. Adding another place is going to fracture things even further IMO. It'll also require people to watch another place for feedback unless it's done carefully. IMO planet is for keeping informed. If it is meant to be a bridge into getting involved as well I think it should do that, bridge, to the core places discussion and development is going on. I think the core of this suggestion is that a lot of developers and core community members have twitter accounts, and people are going to be interested in following that aspect of the community. To do this effectively someone needs to control who's in the group so that it's an accurate representation of who's actually involved. I'd like to reiterate my suggestion that step 1 simply be to create a planet.m.o twitter account, and have that account start following people. No account is necessary for users to then see the tweets being sent to that account. Existing twitter users know how to respond to discussion already if they see something that excites them in the mean time. Also, I don't think anyone is saying to do this just for twitter. Facebook has had a Mozilla group for quite some time. Whatever comes out of the full on plan could involve aggregating (and providing discussion for or not) tweets, facebook statuses, and any other forms of micro-blogging available out there that people in the community are using. It's just a place to start.
(In reply to comment #7) > I'd like to reiterate my suggestion that step 1 simply be to create a > planet.m.o twitter account, and have that account start following people. I don't know who runs mozillafirefox but if someone could manage that to follow all the Mozilla team, that would work out perfectly.
For one, I'm a little concerned about adding another medium. 1. It fragments discussion (wiki, bugzilla, newsgroups, irc, blogs/planet, will it ever end?) 2. How many will *really* use it? Or just subscribe to it via an rss reader and let it sit and grow, then declare "rss bankruptcy" clear it out and start over? 3. When does it become information overload? There should be choice, but at some point, even Robert Scoble must run out of time to keep up.
(In reply to comment #8) > (In reply to comment #7) > > I'd like to reiterate my suggestion that step 1 simply be to create a > > planet.m.o twitter account, and have that account start following people. > > I don't know who runs mozillafirefox but if someone could manage that to follow > all the Mozilla team, that would work out perfectly. > Pkim is the owner of that. cc:ing him.
(In reply to comment #3) > For what it's worth a new open-source twitter-alike just started up. identi.ca > -- given how unreliable twitter is these days, i'm not sure i'd put all my eggs > in that particular basket :) > I looked into this, that's just a site that uses open source software, Laconica. http://laconi.ca/Main/Source Mozilla could run their own, but I fear one of the things that might be an issue is software with an API. Most of the twitter posts, I think, are with external apps. Chris Blizzard uses twitterfox half the time, the web the other. Frank Hecker only uses twitterrific. Mike Beltzner uses tinytwitter and TwitterFox most of the time. Brian King uses twitterfox, twitterberry, and twitter tools. Rob Campbell mostly uses twitterfox. So, Laconica has a bug for a twitter-compatible API. I haven't found anything on an actual API though, other than the twitter and pownce compatible ones. http://laconi.ca/PITS/00065 Thus, I don't think laconica is a suitable "make them go elsewhere", but in the future it might be. I'm fine with using twitter user mozillafirefox to friend all these people, and making a with_friends RSS feed for planet (however, the with_friends feed is per user, and you have to authenticate for the user to look at his friends, but the benefit is you can see 'private' posts this way).
The mozillafirefox account we run out of MoCo currently follows over 2K twitter users. How would you screen out non-planet Mozilla bloggers to do what you are proposing? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just set up a new purpose driven twitter account?
(In reply to comment #12) > The mozillafirefox account we run out of MoCo currently follows over 2K twitter > users. How would you screen out non-planet Mozilla bloggers to do what you are > proposing? Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just set up a new purpose driven > twitter account? First: Why does it follow people like that? That sounds a lot like the BarackObama account, it "follows" people that it does not actually read. If you have issues mass un-following people, I would volunteer to login and remove all the followed users and add the proper people to the followed list. However, you are correct, I completely worded that wrong. I should say that making mozillafirefox only follow mozilla related people allows other users to easily note who is actually official, because mozillafirefox would be following them. Currently, firefox_answers is doing a better job at following mozilla employees/devs than mozillafirefox ;). That's the only reason to do it on the mozillafirefox account. What should the official account be named? The username 'planetmozilla' is not (yet) taken.
I'm not sure exactly what the problem you're trying to solve is, exactly. If you want to use the whoisi stuff to do this you're more than welcome: http://whoisi.com/search?search=mozilla%3A It's not a complete list but you can follow people across networks if you want. But it sounds like you want this to be twitter-specific? And maybe get private messages too? Once again, confused, but I thought I would at least tell you what would work with whoisi. Probably not exactly what you're looking for, but it's there.
Blizzard: I like whoisi, but I'm not sure if it's up to the task (it doesn't do chronological for search filters, for example). What I meant by private messages too is that people can say their accounts require approval for followers, and thus a planetmozilla bot could follow them and not show every single post on the micro-planet, but only ones deemed public, e.g. contain Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, or whatever else. Maybe even have a public flag, like a ~ at the beginning. One example of an important (but private) account: http://twitter.com/gen.
(In reply to comment #15) > Blizzard: I like whoisi, but I'm not sure if it's up to the task (it doesn't do > chronological for search filters, for example). > > What I meant by private messages too is that people can say their accounts > require approval for followers, and thus a planetmozilla bot could follow them > and not show every single post on the micro-planet, but only ones deemed > public, e.g. contain Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird, or whatever else. Maybe > even have a public flag, like a ~ at the beginning. One example of an > important (but private) account: http://twitter.com/gen. > I think this is all getting us into the realm of future. In the mean time people who don't want Firefox fans to follow their twitter should just not allow planetmozilla to follow them. Depending on how people use this and how popular it gets who knows what we'll want to do. Maybe teams will start creating twitter accounts like we have group blogs. I agree with pkim, we should create a twitter account called planetmozilla which has some similar oversight into who gets watched as planet does. Remember the goal is to make it easy for twitter users to see who is involved in mozilla just like planet does that for our blogs and the facebook group does it for us there. Ideally there's a link to it from the planet sidebar and at this point nothing more. Lots of room and time to find out how users like it and how it should be tweaked after.
Hopefully this mockup might help demonstrate what a microplanet would look like.
Comment on attachment 331404 [details] I've created a mockup of what this might look like. The "Micro-planet" is not intended to be a utility for the Summit, but an aggregator for all of MoCo, similar to how planet.mozilla.org aggregates blog posts, this would aggregate micro-content.
(In reply to comment #18) > (From update of attachment 331404 [details]) > The "Micro-planet" is not intended to be a utility for the Summit, but an > aggregator for all of MoCo, similar to how planet.mozilla.org aggregates blog > posts, this would aggregate micro-content. I didn't actually make the mockup, it's a screenshot of http://moz08.mozilla.org/ cropped to just the webpage. I was jokingly calling it a mockup as it is similar (in design) to what a micro-planet would look like, but not exactly how it would operate (anyone can post to it, etc).
(In reply to comment #19) > I didn't actually make the mockup, it's a screenshot of > http://moz08.mozilla.org/ cropped to just the webpage. I was jokingly calling > it a mockup as it is similar (in design) to what a micro-planet would look > like, but not exactly how it would operate (anyone can post to it, etc). > I see...I wrote Summitr, but I didn't realize that someone had updated the header so I got confused, I thought you modified it a bit. Seems morgamic's been busy :).
URL: http://crowdstatus.com/moznetcrowd.aspx → http://summit.mozilla.org
Hi all, checkout http://www.Mozillaca.com created, owned, and operated by contributors to the Mozilla project (in various different ways). Jamey Boje, Paul Booker, Otto de Voogd, Ian Hayward, Lou Cypher, and myself. While it's open to everyone, it was created specifically with Mozillians in mind to provide a more centralized location and service for Mozillians to stay in touch and updated on all of the happenings in the world of Mozilla, and an easier way (and again a centralized spot) for anyone else to follow Mozillians and Mozilla related activities. I believe that Mozillaca addresses and perhaps solves the issues here. Mozillaca is based on Laconica and similiar to identi.ca but again, the focus is on Mozilla and Mozillian content. We're still working things out and tweaking this and that, but the site is functional and running great and we welcome suggestions and feedback especially from Mozillians who are the ones that are/will be using Mozillaca.
Cool - as long as it has an RSS feed, works for me.
...or Atom, JSON, carebears -- pick your format.
Ken - btw, this is very cool, thanks for sharing!
LOL Still working on that cutting edge carebears format but Personal, Replies, (and other) pages are available in RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom formats.
Mozillaca is cool, but honestly a bunch of people have Twitter accounts and getting them to create another account somewhere else seems redundant. A while back, Asa, Deb, and a few mozilla.org folks (like myself) talked about adding a sub-site to planet.mozilla.org (/twitter/ or something more generic). From there, we could pull in twitter, mozillaca, indenti.ca, etc. I'm not sure how realtime we could make it, but I bet Les knows. ;) To start, it'd be good to pull in people that are currently on planet (asking them first, maybe?) and then we could expand it the same way we've expanded planet the last few years (through filing bugs and module owners/peers deciding). I'm also in the process of redesigning planet and can add a "twitter" (or, again, whatever we call it) option to the top right where there's currently nothing (see bug 510417). Les, what kind of work would it be to first pull in specific twitter accounts "live" (or as live as we can get)? (We'd the expand it to other services if their APIs were different.)
(In reply to comment #26) > Mozillaca is cool, but honestly a bunch of people have Twitter accounts and > getting them to create another account somewhere else seems redundant. You can't possibly believe that. Mozillaca aside and removed from this, what you're suggesting is that a single service is sufficient or the best so why use another. People have multiple accounts to many different sites and services offering the same basic services like email, photo, video and file uploading and sharing, searching, blogging, instant messaging and on and on. So should we all write off and ignore Identi.ca too because most people use Twitter? Back to Mozillaca though, it's based on Laconica (same as Identi.ca) which is open source and while it's open to anyone, it was/is intended for use by Mozillians. It will never be as popular, big, or as widely used as Twitter the same way that Songbird will never be as popular, big, or as widely used as iTunes, but that doesn't mean that all involved in those should throw in the towel and go home.
Woah woah woah... Please read the rest of my comment. I said we should start with the ability to pull Twitter first and get the rest as we can. I also implied that if the APIs are the same, there's no reason not to include other services as well. The reality of the situation today is that the largest majority of the Mozilla community are on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. We should work to pull from sources like those (I mentioned Twitter first because I know their API is fairly open) and then add the other ones. There's no reason there can't be support for multiple "microblogging"-type sites.
If Laconica could pull in tweets that would perhaps be something, but I think the social networking sphere is fragmented enough. Having one service just for mozilla tweets seems akin to everyone creating a blog for just mozilla posts, rather than just using their existing blog. Or requiring bloggers to manually submit posts to planet. To much effort means to many people just don't participate. That's a big problem. As a result I think I'm in favor of aggregation of twitter, Identi.ca, Facebook, whatever via either a widget type appearance on planet, or just a separate page. IMHO we're looking for a way to view client, not create a twitter competitor. We should be pulling streams of content and making it more accessible to people in 1 location. That's planet's real mission.
(In reply to comment #26) > Les, what kind of work would it be to first pull in specific twitter accounts > "live" (or as live as we can get)? (We'd the expand it to other services if > their APIs were different.) Probably the easiest thing to do is to create a new or use an existing "Mozilla" twitter profile, follow all Mozillans from that profile, then use the Twitter API to watch the friends timeline. That's as close as you get to "realtime" on Twitter. There are RSS feeds for everyone, but they're often delayed for up to 30-60 min unless you authenticate - and you might as well use the API at that point. (In reply to comment #27) > You can't possibly believe that. Mozillaca aside and removed from this, what > you're suggesting is that a single service is sufficient or the best so why use > another. People have multiple accounts to many different sites and services > offering the same basic services like email, photo, video and file uploading > and sharing, searching, blogging, instant messaging and on and on. No, what he's suggesting is that most people only have room for one Twitter-like site in their daily attention budget. Asking them to switch after they've built things up on one site will be an uphill climb. How many people use both Flickr and Zooomr on a daily basis? At least for IM there are clients that unify everything into one app. But, generally, people pick one social site from a category and "live" there for awhile.
I think it's fine that it's not real time. People who want real time can add those people to their own accounts of such nature. An hour's delay shouldn't be a problem.
(In reply to comment #30) > Probably the easiest thing to do is to create a new or use an existing > "Mozilla" twitter profile, follow all Mozillans from that profile, then use the > Twitter API to watch the friends timeline. That's as close as you get to > "realtime" on Twitter. There are RSS feeds for everyone, but they're often > delayed for up to 30-60 min unless you authenticate - and you might as well use > the API at that point. Great! That seems easy enough. I think Deb already has a Twitter account that follows most users. We'll just need one on Identi.ca and similar sites that use the same API. Keeping the list of people in sync might be hard, but we can figure that out.
(In reply to comment #32) > Great! That seems easy enough. I think Deb already has a Twitter account that > follows most users. We'll just need one on Identi.ca and similar sites that use > the same API. Keeping the list of people in sync might be hard, but we can > figure that out. Once you have an account with all the mozillans followed, you can actually get pretty fresh RSS out with something like this using HTTP Basic Auth with the Twitter API: http://{USER}:{PASS}@twitter.com/statuses/friends_timeline.rss Then, you can shovel that right into Planet or something similar. The important bit is making Twitter do the aggregation for you on their end. Of course, the downside is that the password shows up in a config file somewhere I haven't checked in awhile, but I think identica supports a clone of the Twitter API, so the above could work there too.
I have a twitter account that follows many (certainly not all) Mozilla twitterers, here: http://twitter.com/mozillians I need to update it, and I need people to email me if there are folks who should be included there who aren't.
I propose @firefox create a list of mozillians, so it's under a very popular username already, and people can just follow that and it'll dynamically catch everybody.
Assignee: asa → nobody
I'm WONTFIXing this for a couple of reasons; Planet is syndicated to Twitter now via IFTTT, and I think Twitter is both too wide-ranging and big a place now to make a list like this effective. (also: Twitter is turning into a thing I feel bad asking people to a participate in.)
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 9 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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