Josh Kim dot Org

I believe this is the third post (that actually made online… I’m not even counting the countless edits and deletes) that is supposed to jump start the blogging machine raging within me.

Maybe if I make this post into “Part 1″ of many, I’ll be compelled to come back and explore new topics. Oh, how much I love to trick myself into doing things.

And so, after closing AIM and Twitter: Let me try this again.

“What are you doing?”

Yes. If you’ve been watching anything on this blog for the past three months, I’ve had 80… EIGHTY… daily twitter summary posts. I think around eighty days ago was when I stopped blogging frequently.

Being such a new medium (and not just to me), I feel as though what counts as “normal” is being established. Some are seeing my updates and are completely horrified. Some are somehow led to follow me and keep up insanely quick paced and lengthy conversations (Yes, I’m looking at you, Jong-Sun… if any of you are following me on Twitter, this man probably has started up Twitter wars with me too often).

Whatever the case may be, I’ve made Twitter my own. I’ve followed and have been followed, and vice versa. It’s a different beast than anything that followed before in the Interwebs.

And it’s a refreshing feeling.

What was I doing before?

I don’t remember very well when I started my Twitter account. It must have been awhile ago… but back then, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do with it.

Of course, as with all social networks, Twitter became useful with people. Earlier on, I didn’t get it. As time passed, finding interesting people to follow (@davemc500hats, @gruber, @siooma even) and even making new people sign up to Twitter has been all too eye-opening.

But first, a little bit about StatusFix.

StatusFix’s Fix Found in Twitterific/TwitterSync

My desire with the side project of StatusFix was simple: It was what I needed. I wanted a way to track my past “away”/status messages, as well as an interface to see what other people’s were.

Even since I used the “away” message box as a secondary channel for communication, I wanted a way to have a historical backlog of it; I wanted to be able to search it (due to my insanely geeky nature of trying to have a new “away” message up every time I was “away”); I wanted it to be publicly available outside of AIM (linkable).

SIDENOTE: Why do I keep using passive? Crap.

I keep putting away in quotation marks because the “away” message is a perfect example of how people took a feature and made it their own. A vast majority of the people to this day aren’t actually away when their “away” message is up. More or less, it has become their status message: the song their listening to, the thing that they’re reading, the affect of the current weather to his or her mood. Soon, the networks realized this (MSN, I believe, was the first to implement this) and made it possible to still be online, but have a status message as well.

Due to Twitter’s extremely open API architecture (including their Jabber push mechanism), as long as they keep being stable, Twitter could be the back bone of such a system.

And so, I decided to use this backbone. Many Twitter clients (I especially prefer Twitterific) give me the ability to tie my status message with Twitter and AIM. Also, by using TwitterSync, I’m able to sync my status with Facebook.

AIM, Facebook, Twitter. One “return” to rule them all. (I really tried to using the word “return” with the Return of the King, but I stopped caring.)

The Existing Problems

As I said before, stability is a problem with Twitter. Hopefully, that’ll be dealt with soon enough, regardless if they go with some other language/framework.

Also, since this system is dependent on so many different pieces, it’s much more likely to fail than, say, having an actual fully fledged app to handle all statuses.

This also means that people are getting the same content three times. If a friend of mine is also on AIM, Facebook, and Twitter, they’ll see the same update in three different streams.

But then again, maybe these problems will be fixed by StatusFix, or some other solution. FriendFeed? Maybe.

More likely, I’m making a big deal out of nothing. My needs tend to be quite specific at times.

WEEE!!!

Which reminds me, the next post will do something with the Wii. And Rock Band. Or something.

Or I’ll work on the actual blog itself.