My to-do list for Identi.ca

Wednesday, August 06, 2008 by Dave Winer.

I had a great phone conversation yesterday with Evan at Identi.ca. It was just an hour, but we covered a lot of ground. And Evan is an open kind of guy, so I'm pretty sure he won't mind me saying what I was lobbying for him to do next. 

1. Cosmetics. I want to spiff up my presence on Identi.ca the same way I have with my presence on Twitter.  

2. Payloads. We never got them from Twitter, so as a result every time you want to push a picture or video through Twitter, it involves showing the user a URL. Over time it fades into the background, we forget how ugly this is, but when you use FriendFeed, you don't see so many URLs cause it understands a few common data types, and does something intelligent with them. This should be formalized before it gets out of control, and RSS enclosures are the obvious way to go. Thumbs for pictures, embedded MP3 player for audio, same for video, where possible. 

3. Threaded discussions through a plug-in with Disqus et al. 

4. Plug-ins! (This is killer. I would write some right off the bat.) 

5. Let's play with RSS clouds for lightweight federation. Again, I would definitely ship code that connected with Identi.ca on this level. It's been years since I did anything with clouds in RSS, but it's a feature that's been there for a half-decade, ready for someone to pick it up. This one was Evan's idea, but I obviously support it.  

Anyway, there were some other things we talked about, of course, that I don't want to make public at this time, esp things Evan is going to do that are cool but didn't come from me. Gotta leave something to tease about.