For now, the name is Micros.
The microblog on Melative is perhaps one of the most familiar features for users, but with the amount of attention and development that goes in, there must be something more.
What is the Micros?
Micros is a textual interface for micro-updates, which also allows inline commands on context-types, or what we call textual scrobbling. Textual, for the scrobbled update (e.g. ‘listening to /music/Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain/track/Gold Soundz.’) may also have a message appended to the event (e.g. ‘listening to /music/CRCR/Range Life. We should all strive for a range life.’).
It may be seen as a status-update type interface, but there is special nuance between “status-update” and “microblog” (here is a clear explanation which I find handy). When we consider textual scrobbling containing message content, it is much more fitting to be called microblogging than status-update. The key here is “content,” or more specifically publishing content.
At the top level, Micros aims to be more akin to WordPress, in that it allows content publishing, but in a micro manner. This similarity also is aligned with the notion of being open-source and allowing decentralized installations.
Why is Micros important?
As we develop this feature more, we are aiming to extract and modularize it as a standalone application, while still allowing interface commands to have value on the Melative experience engine (organizing, categorizing, interacting with a user’s media library).
At the same time, the system will be built for near-real-time notifications across domains, yes cross-domain following/subscriptions/@replies.
We feel, that in this age of communication, there is little reason to centralize micropublishing to a few large, closed1 channels (Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter), where there is no inter-channel communication without valid usership on each service.
Simply put, Micros is a blog which will notify subscriptions in near-real-time, without the need for centralization (those who are subscribed on various domain/nodes will receive the content directly).
Notes
1 – Closed in the sense that non-users may not interact, this is the opposite for Wordpress, which allows non-user commenting. Micros will allow non-user following, where the event (an XML packet) is sent to subscribed nodes.
-There are other features behind the system, such as scrobble-anything and exact context-referencing, but they are slightly more specific to the experience engine (allowing logging, linking, rating, tagging, wishlisting all from the microblog).
