I had been rolling around some thoughts on microblogging and programming since my last blog post. First of all, I found it interesting that Twitter started life as an internal project before getting VC funding. This reenforces, to me, the value of what I as saying, which is that microblogging for more limited audiences and topics is more useful than the present day and age where we have people microblogging about brushing their teeth.
I have also been interested in doing more work on Sheepshead. According to gitorious, my last commit was over a month ago. Such are the results of having a family, a job, and a life--but I really want to get back to working on it. As I start gearing it all up again, I have decided to try a little experiment. Instead of simply waiting on someone else to try out microblogging for a small development team, I am going to try to bootstrap a small team while microblogging. As I develop Sheepshead and push it forward, I am going to try and use microblogging to mull over design decisions and announce progress.
The service I have decided to use for this endeavor is Identi.ca (you can see the stream here), rather than the more ubiquitous Twitter. I did this for a few reasons, chief among them being that I expect there to be more engineering types as well as more open source-minded individuals on Identi.ca. Another important consideration is that Identi.ca allows its users to export data. My intention is to keep backups of the information on the feed, so that if something were to happen to Identi.ca and the project attained a meaningful size, a StatusNet instance could be setup, even if only as a stopgap.
We will see how this all goes (or if it does--I can definitely see how Sheepshead is sort of a niche development). In the mean time, I am going to try and get some code written.