End of an era

Joi Ito has stopped moblogging. For now anyways.

Just now, I switched both the “top strip moblog” on the homepage and the “most recent picture” widget that appears on the archives, to no longer display entries from Joi’s moblog setup, but rather the most recent pictures from his Flickr stream.

Joi started moblogging in November 2002. I came in and built a custom solution, with the help of my friend Francis, back in June or July of 2003. Up until last month, March 2007, Joi was still using this same system, all his moblog emails going through Francis’ server in Parc Ex (Montreal). The code there did a few things: created thumbnails, uploaded both versions to the server to a predefined path, posted the entry, forwarded copies to Flickr and somewhere else. I still use this system myself.

The Wikipedia entry for Moblog features a screencap of Joi’s moblog.

Looks the same. What changed?
Joi’s “behavior” changed. He bought a camera he really likes (despite it’s quirks ;). He takes real photos and posts them to Flickr after picking the ones he wants to share and cleaning them up. He’s using Flickr in that other way Flickr is meant to be used: a photo gallery / sharing system.
This is very different from quick cameraphone shots uploaded to share glimpses of your day, be it with the world or your FTIC (“Full Time Intimate Community”), or somewhere between.

So what now?
That’s up to Joi of course. We’ve talked about using Radar, understanding that that is a far more private affair, and not something we pull into the main site. Otherwise, we can just ditch the old custom system we have and use flickr as our infrastructure. Easily done.

Personally, I hope he pulls out the cameraphone every now and then again… and professionally, still so much to explore with the mobile stuff… quick! someone send him a pair of Nokia N95‘s!!;)

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