I think SMS gateways should be just another XMPP client for twitter/identi.ca. Telephony providers could implement them and charge their users (that also may happen to be existing clients) for the SMS sent and recived. It makes so much more sense, instead of having the service pay for them!

Could this be twitter’s plan? To charge telcos for the right to access XMPP?

TwitVim, a Vim plugin that allows you to post to Twitter and view Twitter timelines, has now support for urlBorg. Cool! Details at mortonfox.livejournal.com.

Nektarios is developing a drupal plugin that will make use of urlBorg. He asked me why, urlBorg creates a new short URL every time he makes an API call, even if the target URL is the same. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to get the same short URL? Isn’t it a waste of resources (i.e. storage space) to create and store a new short URL every time?

This is one of the main design decisions I had to do when I started developnig urlBorg. And I’ve changed my mind a couple of times. But I think that creating a new short URL is the right way to go. Here is why.

The creation of a short URL is a “gesture of attention” (if you are not familiar with the term, read Geting a piece of the action: The attention economy). An if a URL shortener is worth something, this is because it is a good database of two kind of “gestures”:
- the one is when someone manifests his interest on a specific URL, by creating a short URL for it.
- the other is when someone clicks on the short URL.

urlBorg keeps track of both. The click stats are visible to anyone, the just have to add /i at the end of a urlBorg short URL, like this Comments (1)

Sounds like the latest url shortener, called bit.ly, got a lot of attention. As an answer to my rant, that you have to involve an a-lister to get some attention, my good friend Nikos stepped forward and did a crash test: bit.ly vs. urlBorg.

To be honest, bit.ly has some nice features and anyone interested in this kind of things should give it a try. On the other hand urlBorg is ahead of bit.ly in some areas. Give both a try!

My suggestion to Comment Portability: The Commenting Standard of the Future is a very simple, tried an decentralized solution:

Add an extra “comment tracker” URL to any comment form and trackback to this URL the content of the comment, the link to the post, etc. It will be much like blogs, some users may prefer a hosted solution, others may set up their own comment tracker. It will look muck like a blog, if not integrated into one (my comments on any blog could appear as posts, or asides on my own blog too).

Most of the code to implement something like this is already out there, included in almost any blogging platform. The tools, like akismet, to deal with spam, misuse, etc, are also there, and so are the tools to export, backup and migrate the data.

Why not?

I just got home from the 13th OpenCoffee Athens meeting. What was special this time was Mike Butcher’s presence (editor of Techcrunch UK). It was a great night, with many interesting presentations from greek startups.

Here is what Mike told me, after the presentations were over. The greek startups were quite in sync with what he said that should be considered an advantage for them: social networks, mobile and localization/language.

BTW, Mike, if you end up here, take a look at my project, urlBorg. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to prepare and do a presentation. Oh, and thanks for the time you spent with us and the interesting conversation!

Check out the startups that presented:
- Wadja
- Photo Frame show
- transifex
- askmarkets
- qualia
- product madness
- blymee
- sojourner
- slideflickr