If we replaced Facebook with a decentralized collection of cooperating services that provide a similar collection of features, obvious candidates for some of these services are FOAF files, twitter, and flickr, but what would coordinate those services? Some have APIs and can store information that lets you make connections between the different services, so I wrote something to make one of those connections.

People love to talk about the implications of twitter.com going down, but what if a URL-shortening service goes down? When I had trouble getting to is.gd recently, I realized that when they’re down tweets referencing is.gd URLs are worthless—and that it wouldn’t be too difficult to do something about it before this happens. (I have wondered, though: why doesn’t twitter grab some short domain name and offer their own shortening service?) After all, if you’re saving any…

I’ve tried various Twitter clients, but usually just went back to the twitter.com web-based interface that people hate so much. My main complaint with it—and I saw no other clients that did any better—was that it showed tweets in reverse chronological order. Conversations and the multi-tweet mini-essays that some people write are difficult to read that way, so I decided to write my own little client.

When you have to fit Twitter messages into 140 characters, URL shortening services such as TinyURL and is.gd are handy, but I hate seeing tweets likes this:

After joining twitter last April, I entered the following as my second entry a month later: