I’m a big fan of Alexis’ When-Can-I-Use site. I liked it so much that I asked him to let me link directly to when a specific feature will be usable. He obliged. Here is an example of when SVG will be usable.

I then started using that enough that I became mildly annoyed that the options take up so much space that people wouldn’t understand that I was linking to without scrolling the web page. So I asked Alexis to provide a setting in the URL to hide all those options. He humored me again and implemented my suggestion. He even provided an example link. The problem was that this part of the conversation happened on Twitter.

Anyway, I used this feature a couple times and it worked great. Now it’s months later: I have forgotten the option and failed to write it down or bookmark it or … That was clearly my fault. The fact that Alexis didn’t make that option discoverable on his site is another problem (but it is his prerogative).

Snap forward to today and I read Mark’s latest excuse to drop a few F-bombs. I wanted to provide him with that option in the URL so people could get his point (that @font-face is almost ready to be widely used on the web).

I toyed with the idea of just sending Alexis an email to send me the details of that option, but that’s just too slow these days – plus the information is out there!

I ended up seeking Alexis’ Twitter profile, then going back in time (several pages, I might add). Because it was a tiny URL I almost missed it. Thankfully some surrounding tweets gave me a clue of the context. Here is his tweet.

I’m still convinced that talking at 140 characters a time is just the wrong way to communicate. Throw in the fact that I don’t really own that data (it’s in someone else’s database). Throw in the fact that Twitter is notoriously unreliable. Throw in short URL services. Throw in the fact that threaded conversations are only sometimes navigatable and in only one direction. Throw in the fact that you can’t even tell what message Fyrd is replying to because he used Netvibes. Throw in the fact that the conversation is not searchable like it would be using email, IRC logs, or blog conversation. Why are we doing this again? We are doing it because everyone is doing it too and we don’t want to miss out.

But we are not thinking about the longer term usefulness of that communication. Twitter is a very short-sighted way for us to be communicating in the 21st century. And these problems go FAR beyond the Short URL one. Yet because that’s where the information is flowing, that’s where people are going.

Anyway, I’ll take this as a lesson learned: If I find something important on Twitter, make sure I write it down somewhere else.

• Opera’s “Web Opener” (and newest Interest Group member) makes a request
• Internet Explorer’s Head Honcho gets a little huffy
• Snarkiness

BTW, if you’re not on Twitter yet, you are missing out. For instance, I find this feed useful.

• Kurafire: EPIC HAIL
• Molly: EPIC SAIL
• Kurafire: EPIC FLAIL
• Kurafire: EPIC INHALE
• Kurafire: EPIC WHALE (also cwilso)
• Molly: EPIC SALE
• Eric Meyer: OPEC FAIL
• Eric Meyer: E-PIC FAIL
• Chris Wilson: EPIC MAIL
• Chris Wilson: EPIC KALE
• Me: EPIC GALE
• Me: EPIC STALE

The problem, of course, is that not everyone is on the same social network. And you might not want to be on any of the social networks that I’m on. Or you might not trust any of those companies. Enter ping.fm.

ping.fm serves as a central point for me to blast out my navel-gazing, mind-numbingly boring status updates to a variety of services (all of the ones mentioned above and more like Plurk, MySpace, Pownce, LinkedIn, Tumblr). This means when I make a status update at ping.fm, it gets fanned out to all the sites I’ve ping-enabled (of course I have to give them credentials for each site).

All of this is great but not totally innovative, it’s just another layer of madness above the existing, silo’ed madness. And it doesn’t solve the fragmented two-way conversation problem (replies on Twitter stay on Twitter, etc). But what caught my eye this evening was the ability to fan my ping.fm updates to custom URLs. This means I can set up a PHP page on my own website and ping.fm will send the status updates to that page also. This opens up some interesting possibilities.

So I did just that. I now have a microblog/status feed on this site if anyone cares when I brushed my teeth or if I’m late for a train. Be the first to know!

How it works: I use ping.fm to post my status and it is fanned out automatically to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, identi.ca and codedread’s custom PHP. That PHP takes the status and adds it to a static Atom file on my site.

So now that I’ve got a microblog feed that’s disentangled from any one particular social network, I’ll probably add some code to my site to display the latest status from my microblog feed somewhere.

Oh and if you don’t like the funky character in the URL then you can also use this one. They both point to the same location.

One request to ping.fm: Please support OpenID!

It was a fun little one-off project that gave me new appreciation for Inkscape, at the same time renewing my frustration with SVG interoperability across browsers (particularly when it comes to SVG included into HTML via reference). One day I’d like to be able to embed stuff like this into the web page in a scalable way (as a percentage of browser window width). For now, many browsers still have issues with this.

Uncompressed raw file here.