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the net is buzzing on identi.ca, a twitter-esque microblogging-service launched by Evan Prodromou a few days ago. as of today, identi.ca lacks many key-features Twitter has (SMS-gateway, API) or used to have (track). but criticizing identi.ca’s need to catch up is missing the point, as it’s not competing with Twitter on the level of features (yet), but rather on the underlying principles of message-transportation: identi.ca is based on laconi.ca, an opensource implementation of the OpenMicroBlogging-spec, which basically means - everbody can install his very own instance of laconi.ca/identi.ca on their own servers! the OpenMicroBlogging-spec is the glue that sticks those independent instances of laconi.ca together, enabling subscriptions (aka following) & postings across various systems. in a nutshull, a distributed network of laconi.ca’s promises independence from the fail-whale…

how does this work out for the user? lets assume you’re using microblogging-platform A and want to follow someone at platform B. you find that someone’s profile on platform B and click “subscribe”. remember, you have no account on B, so you’re now asked to enter your user-ID from platform A, which contains the URL of A plus your username, something like http://platform-a.com/username.

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fbCal is a godsend for those who tend to forget birthdays (like me) and rarely log into Facebook anymore (like me) [even when I did, I never really noticed the upcoming birthdays on the homepage anyway]. fbCal (a Facebook-app) generates RSS-/iCalendar-feeds for your friends’ birthdays & your upcoming events on FB, which you then can pipe into Google Calendar, iCal etc. but don’t cry if you still forget your best friends birthday, maybe he/she hasn’t made this data available to you on FB at all…

…must be posterous! to start blogging, follow these steps:

1. sign-up at posterous.com
2. e-mail your first post to post@posterous.com

that’s it, really! after receiving your first e-mail, posterous sets up your blog at an auto-generated URL like michael-go12qr.posterous.com. ok, if you’re not into these kind of URLs, there’s one last step:

      3. visit your new blog & change the URL to something more human readable.

just hat a great time toying around with PicLens, a browser-extension that displays image-streams in a semi-3D environment. controlling the image-stream is easy: use the scrollbar to swift through pictures quickly and smoothly, zoom using the mouse-wheel.

PicLens is available for Firefox, IE, Safari, works fullscreen, and basically supports any website offering RSS-feeds with enclosures (f.e. flickr, photobucket, smugmug). There’s also support for YouTube and Amazon.

sorry for the recent lack of updates on this blog folks… just too much workload…

anyway, just stumbled over these interesing Twitter-client usage-stats at Neoformix…in a nutshell: web-usage is dominating much more than I’ve thought it would…

Tripwolf is the latest project launched by austrian incubator i5invest (others include email charity, Papermint and 123people), and this time it’s all about social travel meets wiki. Tripwolf scores with a very polished design, smart features against social-fatigue (i.e. importing your social graph from Facebook) and a very ajax-ified user-interface. the printed PDF-travel-guides might seem a bit oldschool but are definitely a great idea. other features like the Dopplr-like “My Trips” (just guessing…) are still to come.

If you’re eager to try it out, Tripwolf kindly provided me with 50 invites - and be sure to visit the only place in the world I’ld easily qualify for as a “trip-guru”

a common saying in web 2.0-land goes: “one never gets tired of twitter-mashups”. ok, I just made that one up. anyway, here are the three most recent twitter-mashups I’ve come across worth mentioning, in ascending order of hotness (according to my bias).

Tweetwheel

Tweetwheel displays bilateral connections between your twitter-followers (or the followers of any twitter-account, since this info is free available as of recently). nothing more to say, except that the mashup seems to have a bug or two (I can’t open my personal wheel no more, which worked yesterday. neither can I refresh it).

Twistori

the brainchild of Thomas Fuchs (script.aculo.us) and Amy How, Twistori is the Google Zeitgeist of the twittersphere. it simply aggregates emotional tweets by keywords like love, hate, wish, feel etc. and displays them in a vertical scrolling way. simple, but somehow awesome.

Twitsay

developed by Max Kossatz, Twitsay is an iteration on Dave Winer’s Twittergram. the usecase: send audio-payloads to your Twitter-stream simply by using your (mobile)phone to call a special number. other than Twittergram - which is available only through a US-line (provided by Blogtalk-Radio, afaik) - Twitsay offers regular lines for austria & germany (soon to be extended to US & UK, as I ‘ve heard from Max).

I always liked Winer’s idea for its simplicity, but never actually tried it for reasons of cost. thx to Max, now I can.

this wednesday (30.4.) vienna’s (I guess) bloggers meet up at Blogtail 3. I just decided to join them for a beer or two, maybe you’ll come to

sign up here or on Facebook to get a free drink.

so I got an invitation to Microsoft Mesh last night (it pays to stay up late and follow @stevegillmor). in some way Mesh is Microsoft’s answer to offline webapps (think Google Gears, AIR), weaving the fabric that is supposed to connect multiple devices, and applications. in its current rendition (don’t forget, this is labeled ‘Tech Preview’), Mesh sets up a virtual desktop, which is used to synchronize file-folders among different computers and different users (if you wish to collaborate). next to each folder, a small history & message-board is displayed. being Ray Ozzies brainchild, it should be no suprise that this sounds quite a bit like what Groove has been doing for ages.

while you can access mesh through the browser [screenshot above] (and Microsoft obviously has learned a lesson here, since it works flawlessly on Firefox, and also on Mac), the real fun starts after installing the Mesh-software to your local Windows(XP/Vista)-PC. mesh-folders are now transparently included on your local desktop [screenshot below], syncing existing folders to the cloud is only a matter of few clicks. if nothing else, Mesh is a slick way to backup local data to the web (5gbyte for free doesn’t sound too bad, right?).

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meet Vienna’s finest geeks at Tuplao’s @ PLAY.FM. tomorrow night. no excuses!