Twitter is an efficient technology for spreading and harvesting concise ideas. Unfortunately, it’s not so great for sharing rich media. Want to broadcast a video? You’ll have to settle for a TinyURL to YouTube, or maybe switch over to Seesmic altogether.

Pownce improves on the Twitter model by supporting file transfers and at least one new data type: the structured event. It also appears to be evolving into a better system for trading music, possibly with a full-featured music player.

But if music is indeed a significant part of Pownce’s future, then Blip is one step ahead. Call it “Twitter for Music” since it’s essentially just that: a way to suggest music and share your thoughts about it with a network of contacts.

The beauty of Blip is that, unlike with Pownce, no file uploads are necessary. Just search for the song you have in mind and Blip will grab it from Seeqpod, Skreemr, or parent company Fuzz’s own database of music. Your followers (”listeners”) can hear full versions of the songs you post using a Songza-like player at the bottom of the page.

Of course, just as people are wary of joining yet another social network, they’re sure to think twice about leaving behind a network of followers for a new micro-blogging platform. So Blip debuts with the ability to push messages out to FriendFeed, Twitter, Pownce, and Tumblr. This may not ensure its survival in the long run, especially if Twitter or Pownce decide to integrate Songza, but it should help with adoption rates.

Fuzz, the company that created Blip, is a self-described “CRM for bands” - a place where indie artists can set up web presences and manage their relationships with fans. It also features a mixtape maker like Mixwit and Muxtape, but with songs contributed directly by artists themselves.

The San Francisco-based company, which launched Fuzz in Spring 2007, is funded by angel investors. Follow me on Blip here.

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MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.

A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.

The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says. Every site remains an island.

But with Data Availability, partners will be able to access MySpace user data, combine it with their own, and present it on their sites outside of the normal widget framework. Friends lists can be syncronized, for example. Or Twitter may use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends.

The data sharing is dynamic, meaning it is updated constantly. And that also means user permission is not a one time thing. At any time a user can change or revoke the rights of a third party to access the data. Those third parties are “being held to strict terms of service,” says MySpace, which prohibits them from storing the data or using it once permissions are revoked.

For now, just the four launch partners will have access to Data Availability, and the features should go live in the next couple of weeks. More partners will be added over time, and MySpace says they eventually want to give even “mom and pop” websites ways to be involved.

What About Open Social?

MySpace is a partner in Google’s OpenSocial project, but this is being done outside of that framework. MySpace says they’ll adopt the Open Social APIs that evolve around data sharing once they are developed and announced.

The Center Of All User Data

Historically MySpace has lagged Facebook in terms of innovation. But they definitely “get it” this time. Sharing user data so openly (with user permission) is a terrific way to incentivize users to store all their core data at MySpace to begin with. Users eventually need one place on the Internet to store their data, or lots of places to store different types of data. But what they don’t want is today’s world where they are recreating and storing the same data over a plethora of social networks just because all those sites refuse to share. We’re starting to see the floodgates open and the idea of data sharing become a reality (thanks largely to the efforts of Data Portability and other activists in this space).

By acting first, MySpace takes the lead and has a shot at being the long term winner - meaning lots of people use MySpace as the place to store data, and share it out to other applications from there. Look for Google to make their move next.

See my post on “The Centralized Me” for more of my thinking on this.

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MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of the Internet.

A mockup of how the data sharing will look in action with Twitter is shown above. MySpace is essentially making key user data, including (1) Publicly available basic profile information, (2) MySpace photos, (3) MySpaceTV videos, and (4) friend networks, available to partners via their (previousy internal) RESTful API, along with user authentication via OAuth.

The key goal is to allow users to maintain key personal data at sites like MySpace and not have it be locked up in an island. Previously users could turn much of this data into widgets and add them to third party sites. But that doesn’t bridge the gap between independent, autonomous websites, MySpace says. Every site remains an island.

But with Data Availability, partners will be able to access MySpace user data, combine it with their own, and present it on their sites outside of the normal widget framework. Friends lists can be syncronized, for example. Or Twitter may use the data to recommend other Twitter users who are your MySpace friends.

The data sharing is dynamic, meaning it is updated constantly. And that also means user permission is not a one time thing. At any time a user can change or revoke the rights of a third party to access the data. Those third parties are “being held to strict terms of service,” says MySpace, which prohibits them from storing the data or using it once permissions are revoked.

For now, just the four launch partners will have access to Data Availability, and the features should go live in the next couple of weeks. More partners will be added over time, and MySpace says they eventually want to give even “mom and pop” websites ways to be involved.

What About Open Social?

MySpace is a partner in Google’s OpenSocial project, but this is being done outside of that framework. MySpace says they’ll adopt the Open Social APIs that evolve around data sharing once they are developed and announced.

The Center Of All User Data

Historically MySpace has lagged Facebook in terms of innovation. But they definitely “get it” this time. Sharing user data so openly (with user permission) is a terrific way to incentivize users to store all their core data at MySpace to begin with. Users eventually need one place on the Internet to store their data, or lots of places to store different types of data. But what they don’t want is today’s world where they are recreating and storing the same data over a plethora of social networks just because all those sites refuse to share. We’re starting to see the floodgates open and the idea of data sharing become a reality (thanks largely to the efforts of DataPortability and other activists in this space).

By acting first, MySpace takes the lead and has a shot at being the long term winner - meaning lots of people use MySpace as the place to store data, and share it out to other applications from there. Look for Google to make their move next.

See my post on “The Centralized Me” for more of my thinking on this.

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A number of services have launched to allow users to record messages and link to the recording from Twitter (see Twitsay, Twittergram). And services like Jott and Spinvox are providing tools that allow voice to text conversion for Twitter, Facebook, Pownce and other social networks. But nothing I’ve seen so far is as simple to use as TwitterFone, a new service by serial Irish entrepreneur Pat Phelan.

The service launched moments ago into private beta. To use it you need to verify your phone number and Twitter account, and TwitterFone will then give you a local phone number to call to leave messages (they support the U.S., UK and Ireland now, adding more). Then, any message you send will be transcribed, and posted to Twitter along with a link to the recording (here’s a test message I left). If the message is longer than 140 characters, just the first part is transcribed, but the entire recording is still available. There is a time limit of 15 seconds on the recording.

The service is partially automated via voice recognition software, and flagged words go to a human for translation. For now the service supports English only; Japanese support is promised in 8 weeks or so.

One problem/slightly humorous aspect of the service is that there is no going back once you start recording. In this test message I started coughing and just hung up. The coughing was dutifully transcribed and posted. A simple option at the end of a call to delete the message is needed.

The service is free for now, they may add premium features over time. We have a handful of beta accounts to give out now. Tell us why you think you need it in the comments below - the most compelling get an account.

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We cover some amazing startups here at TechCrunch, and for every service we cover there’s probably a dozen we miss as well, given the hyper-inflated nature of the second great web boom. You can appreciate a service without ever actually going on to use it, but the better ones can change the way you interact with the web or run your working day. I thought as this is my last major post here that I’d share some of the services that I actually use. I started using most of them based on posts at TechCrunch, so if you like these turned out to be my practical standouts in the sea of noise.

Evernote

Evernote has completely changed the way I deal with paper (yes, old fashioned paper). Its been described as everything from a scrap collection through to a bookmarking service, but at its core its a database service with industrial strength OCR capabilities. To use, you can clip data or a link, type a note, add a photo (with support for webcams) or scan info in. Everything added can be tagged and indexed, and is searchable via the text within each document, for example a wine label with no other information becomes searchable by every word on the label itself. I scan every paper bill or letter I receive, allowing me to shred/ dispose of them cutting down on the need to file things manually. More importantly it cuts out the need to have to go through my filing cabinet searching for the bill later. The service has a desktop client and web interface, so you have the security of knowing that your scanned documents always have a local copy, but if you’re at another computer or on the go, you can easily access the same data.

See Erick’s review here.

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Scott Hanselman mused on how such a system might work yesterday. Dave Winer has also written extensively about this, although he’s more focused on simply backing up Twitter messages so that they are still available when the site goes down. He isn’t paying attention to the real benefit of Twitter - the spontaneous, asynchronous conversations that pop up between every changing groups of people. Instead, he just wants to make sure the data is secure.

Marc Canter also weighs in in a surprisingly lucid post. Infrastructure needs to be decentralized to be reliable, he says, pointing to DNS as an example.

Decentralizing Twitter isn’t about having backups of content if the service goes down. It’s about making sure that the service as a whole can’t go down, and allowing all those conversations to continue unabated no matter how popular the service gets.

Here’s How To Decentralize Twitter

Chris Saad, co-founder of DataPortability and founder of startup Faraday Media, thinks he knows one way Twitter can be decentralized effectively.

The key weakness in Twitter (and therefore opportunity for a new decentralized approach) is the fact that so much Twitter activity occurs off Twitter.com. Users are getting very used to using desktop clients (Twitterific, Alert Thingy, Twhirl, etc.), IM, SMS, and other interfaces to talk to Twitter. Those third party applications can be tuned to lock in to the new decentralized Twitter-like service instead or in addition to Twitter itself.

Users on the new system will post to a microblog. Third parties can create platforms for these blogs, and have them be certified as compliant with the microblogging standard - posts of 140 characters, no titles, etc. Users could also install complaint software on their own servers - much as they do with WordPress.org today. There would certainly be an open source project around this shortly.

The hard part is putting these microblog posts together into a Twitter-like conversation where people subscribe to those writers they like, can respond via an “@[username]” mechanism, etc.

This can’t be done efficiently just via RSS because rapid and excessive polling would bring servers to a halt. Instead, Saad thinks wrapping RSS in XMPP, an open standards based instant messaging protocol that was originally created for Jabber and is now used in various applications including Google Talk, is the answer. XMPP allows for pushing of messages to subscribers, which removes the need for constant polling. For more of Saad’s thinking, see his site on their product SyncStream, and they’ve already written code that will do this based on their proposed standard called “GetPingd.” Twitter uses XMPP in their API already; third party applications like Google Talk integrate with Twitter via XMPP already.

If users begin to “twitter” using this new system, applications like Alert Thingy can simply add it to their functionality. Instead of using Alert Thingy to sign into just Twitter, you would also create an account at Alerty Thingy, too, which stores your subscription lists. This is analogous to what feed readers like Google Reader do today with RSS subscriptions.

XMPP already has a mechanism for tracking subscribers which performs the same funtion as the “followers” list in Twitter. Users can therefore have a list and count of followers back on their microblog.

Handling replies is a little more complicated (the @[username] feature on Twitter). One way to do this is to use the existing RSS infrastructure specifically with Google or Technorati Blog search to monitor for @replies and feed this to the user applicaitons. Results wouldn’t be limited to just microblogs, but I’m not sure that matters. It would also be simple to block spammy stuff by simply clicking on a button, the same way Twitter works today.

The net effect of this theoretical platform is to move the publishing to a completely decentralized network, and move the hard part of Twitter into the third party aggregators (which is already a competitive space). There would be no one central bottleneck that could fail.

Twitter (the company, the service, the site or the software) isn’t part of this new decentralized platform, of course, so they’ll oppose it. But can it happen? Absolutely, because it doesn’t require a hard reset to a new Twitter-free world. Existing Twitter clients could add support for GetPingd and the rest of the infrastructure and it would work seamlessly with the existing Twitter world. Anyone could create a website that duplicates what Twitter does today, but supporting the new decentralized framework. And a limitless number of microblogging applications could emerge to join in the fun.

And we’d never have to deal with outages again.

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When Times Bits editor Saul Hansell kicked off the Gang conversation around the advisability of the deal from Ballmer’s perspective, I quickly vectored back to Live Mesh and why it makes the deal make sense. Of course, Microsoft certainly knew about both projects and their timing when they announced the buyout strategy, and few others did. And just as most analysts handicapped the takeover as being about advertising, so too did most view Mesh as a synchronization play.

The latter is like Bill Clinton comparing the Obama campaign to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns, a casual put down by narrowing the focus to the least disruptive aspects of this year’s political fundamentals. Similarly, calling Mesh just another bigco chaining of the previous monopoly to the next one pigeonholes Redmond as the comfortable old shoe of convicted monopolist. In the political world, that’s called framing.

But look at the Yahoo deal in the context of Mesh and a simple but disruptive model emerges. Microsoft must do several hard things with the deal: Use its brute force to acquire the company, and use its openness and transparency to acquire (retain) Yahoo’s customers (I’ll go watch Twitter for a few seconds while you laugh at the idea of Microsoft openness and transparency).

Look, however, at Mesh not as a synchronization technology but as the political renderer for the architectural absorption of Yahoo. The conventional wisdom is that Mesh is Windows only for starters, that the Mac version will come “soon,” that the Web client doesn’t allow provisioning of the system. But what if Silverlight front ends appear this month for various strategic apps? Indeed, Loic Le Meur is already receiving support from Microsoft France for just such a rendering of his Seesmic video tool. Le Meur’s recent acquisition of Twitter rich client Twhirl is next.

What better way to test the sincerity and credibility of Mesh than to ask Microsoft when such Silverlight tools for managing Mesh will appear. If the answer is “we’re working on it,” then the marketplace’s response is “we’re waiting for it.” If Mesh is merely a synchronization grid, why not empower PC, Mac, and Linux machines at one fell swoop to explore the kinds of collaborative net-aware applications that can use a boost for off-line storage, intelligent caching, and richer display?

Yes, this a political request: We’re saying: If you’re in this to achieve trust, lead with it. And if Mesh is much more than synchronization, like say, an elastic mechanism for moving information flows based on user-contracted behavioral signals (gestures) then establishing those relationships at the browser layer would be akin to the classic Web 2.0 eyeball plays.

Today’s most classic such play is Twitter, which has built a hockey stick ramp up out of the most trivial of offerings. But who has married social graph (follow) with search (track) with swarming (XMPP gateways such as the real-time Twitter-to-Gtalk client) so aggressively that the expanding overlapping circles of affinity groups fueled by Track (a special keyword search function of the Gtalk implementation) are already pretty much invulnerable to cloning. Data portability aside, how do you transfer the subtleties of a viral social map from a system in constant use?

Don’t believe me? Who’s going to make us switch away from a real time feed of such high value that if we stop contributing we destroy its value not just for ourselves but for the rest of the network? Why have we not seen significant defections? There have been notorious resignations (Hugh MacLeod) that only underlined the traction by the speed of the return to the fold. And all manner of attacks on the social order of the community, whether personal or political doesn’t matter, and almost impossible to distinguish at that.

Where it took Facebook some 6 months to land in hot water hell with Beacon, Twitter experiences furious storms of battle testing on an hourly basis. Bot attacks are mounting as publishers and PR and PACs nail up exploits and dial them back to the point where they re-submerge below the radar. The nature of follow versus flow dictates a careful measuring of signal vs. noise calculation with every follow, or surrender to search engines which reduce the service down to an after-the-fact snipe hunt for conversations it might have been good to be in if only we knew about them at the time.

That’s why the Track function is the true driver of Twitter’s ongoing power, just as Technorati vanity searches powered the build out of the blogosphere. At any moment, anyone on the planet can signal to one of these hybrid affinity groups that they have a question, an idea, or an answer, harnessing the power of a community of self-selecting, swarming activists looking for the most efficient way to extract value from the infostream.

Tracking goes well beyond search because of the two-way nature of TwitterNet. It’s keyword driven, yes, a search for information swarming around that topic, but it’s more importantly a gesture to other nodes on the network. Tracking Gillmor and NewsGang triangulates not only gestures toward me but toward the content and issues generated by the shows, producing a social graph of real-time conversations that can be entered into, passed along via @messages to other trackers, and expanded over time by follows of the people discovered through this mechanism.

And when Track spam rears its aggressive head to challenge the effectiveness of this network, we’re faced with important decisions on how to preserve the open virality while drawing a line with bad actors who want to shut down the discussion of important issues as the All Rev. Wright All The Time cable networks have done. From this week’s Gang:

Le Meur: I follow the replies to me in public like most people do. It’s very easy to expand that as Steve pointed out. Because you can just start writing more and everyone tracking that will start showing that. For example I have a bot talking to me, I don’t know what it is, it’s kind of stupid but it says ‘hi Loic how are you today,’ you can tell it’s a bot. This is the first versions of spam using this. And I want it filtered. So that’s something we’re thinking about as well. And adding XMPP to it will allow you to filter that. Another way to think about filtering is I’m adding… Scoble are you still there? No he is gone. So he’s always talking about adding those 20,000 people on twitter. Getting one update every second. I added 6000. And it’s great because I can hear everybody talking because that’s what I want, it’s very exciting. But when Steve says something, I want to be notified in a better way. Out of 6000 people there are many people you want to get notified better. That’s something we’re fixing, getting groups of friends. There are many many ideas we can think of and we’re thinking about those.

Canter: Loic, you’ve got the resources and the ability to create parallel systems so that’s how the web works. You don’t rely just upon Twitter. You can have parallel systems with a DNS backbone to connect these infrastructures together so that not all your balls are in Evan Williams’ vice.

Scoble: that’s exactly what Twirl’s doing. They’ve already accepted Twirl and Friendfeed. So if Twitter goes down Friendfeed is still there and vice versa. So there’s already some redundancy coming into the infrastructure through these tools that are starting to hook up the various aggregators and messaging systems that are coming out.

Gillmor Gang 05.02.08

Luckily, and fundamentally I believe by design, Twitter has remained open to a free flow of real-time track-enabled data, and so far has not gated this via API licensing or metering constraints. Like Mesh, the only thing that could stop Twitter would be just such a futile effort at “locking down” the service, giving users an incentive to move and vendors the economics to build an alternative. As long as Mesh walks the walk, and Twitter talks the talk, there’s no way to stop them.

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Former Chief Architect Blaine Cook famously said scaling Rails was “easy” in April 2007 (see image to right), but problems persisted after Cook claimed to have conquered the problem. The service most recently had a three day outage affecting their largest users.

Other massive Rails sites include Scribd, Hulu, and the popular Facebook app Friends for Sale. CrunchBase, our tech company database, is also built on Rails.

Switching off Rails may not solve all of Twitter’s problems. They have nearly two years of infrastructure built up and would face many more growing pains if they switched frameworks. As Twitter considers moving away from Rails, some companies are doing the opposite: last year, Yellowpages.com scrapped Java for Rails, and is now second on the unofficial Rails 100 wiki.

Rails has always bred controversy. Developers have argued that it is fundamentally flawed and unscalable; others have argued back saying the opposite (see here, here, and here). Earlier this year, one of the core community members and creator of the popular Rails web server Mongrel abandoned rails and trashed the community.

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Project Vino, an Australian wine site focused on community recommendations, tried the Twitter wine tasting model today. The site sent three bottles of Kirrihill (South Australia) wine to 12 prominent Australian Twitter users, with the only obligation being to tweet their thoughts to Twitter at the designated times.

Project Vino CEO Hugo Sharp had this to say on the event:

This event is one of the earliest instances of using Twitter to transfer an event as social and active as a wine tasting, into online realms. The end result? A resounding success. When you have a social drink which is best enjoyed sharing experiences with friends, it works perfectly with online communication tools.

As one of the twelve sent the wine it was both a fun, and an informative experience. It helps that the Kirrihill Wine was good, but the networking and good word of mouth will make the 3 cartons an easy spend. Reviews can be found via @projectvino. An experiement that was suppose to last 45 minutes kicked on well and truly past the testing time, a positive sign that the wine was well received.

Pics below are from a live stream of the event.

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Weplug has a clean interface and full featured (if somewhat generic) social networking functionality. Users can add their current status and location to a “lifestream” (basically a list of recent activity), which is syndicated to others through “friendstreams”. It’s all pretty familiar stuff for anyone that’s used Facebook for any length of time, but there are a few key differences.

For one, Weplug promises to release an API that will make its micro-blogging platform accessible to outside programs and devices (think Twitter). Weplug also plans to include auto-location features on its iPhone version of the site. Auto-location doesn’t work yet, but Weplug’s developers intend to use the iPhone’s triangulation feature (and eventually GPS, when it becomes available).

The site is still very much a work in progress. The basic social networking functionality works well enough, but the promised autolocation feature and Twitter-esque API are still a ways off. It’s hard to gauge how well Weplug will do abroad, but to stand a chance stateside its going to need to implement these features soon. As it stands now, Weplug is a nice looking site that few people have a reason to use.

Weplug sprawls a number of well-established spaces. Their competition includes Loopt in the social GPS market, Twitter in micro-blogging, and a plethora of social networking sites.

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