Microblogging With Group Chat

July 3, 2008

Like thousands of others, I am playing around on Identi.ca today. Microblogging is a hot topic especially as Twitter’s growth problems have provided fodder for the armchair scalability experts. We’ve also been thinking about microblogging in the context of Speeqe. I’m not sure where our experiments will lead, but you can see our initial endeavor as the Tweeqe theme over at the Speeqe demo site.

Our original idea was very simple. We wondered what would happen if we moved the text entry box to the top of the page and made new content post at the top. This mimics both Twitter and most blog and blog commenting systems. It gives group chat a completely different and fresh feel.

Just changing those simple things has gotten us thinking about group chat in new contexts, like microblogging. I was pretty surprised to see Dave Cridland wish for a similar thing in his blog post about Identi.ca today:

More interesting would be to model identi.ca as a MUC service, wherein each user has control of a MUC room that is populated by the people they subscribe to. That would give a history interface, as well as a "last status" display, almost for free.

Here he has outlined a private group chat room filled with the people that interest you. With Speeqe, you’d create a room, then use a Pubsub service or an Atom importer to bring in your feeds for example. The other way works as well. Why not have your microblog be a group chat room? Just create a Speeqe room with the Tweeqe theme and start posting. After all, what is Twitter but a sort of on-the-fly group chat?

These ideas are still young and need nurturing, but we’d love to hear feedback from the community. What are your new ideas for group chat?

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