Just short of a millennium ago, and handily beating Project Gutenberg, the Chinese invented movable type. Thus began the slow march of the dissemination of things important and unimportant (though perhaps entertaining) through the intervening ten centuries towards this, our almost ephemeral, digital age.

As App.net (ADN) haltingly passes into the realm of myths and fables an 11th-hour equitable stay was granted by the legend that is @berg; time to fix and thus allow the network's inhabitants to download and unpack their digital memories.

24 more hours, the blink of an eye, and an ending somehow slightly less-memorable than of The Ides Of March; a date I'm sure that was chosen to be symbolic. Symbolic of what though?

How many Orcs though, how many Goblins, Men, Elves, nameless dark forces from the east, how many Trolls were slain during the time ADN shone? How many Adventures were had along the road? How many people met, spoke in hushed (and not-so-hushed) tones, whilst forging lasting alliances over cloudy ale and Elven Lembas bread?

Ok, enough allusions to Tolkien-esque worlds; wasn't it fun‽

Simply, yes.

Incidentally, if you came to this scroll of mine expecting a list of legendary folk, instead look in at 10Centuries.org and pnut.io and see who's there.

Do it.

I have invitation codes for both networks, just ask.

Do it, do it now, lest ye be eaten by a grue or (shudders) settle for Twitter!

(time passes…)

Have you done it yet‽

Who knows, before we know it, people could be telling tales of our later legendary exploits.

I wonder how it feels, when out with your family, if your partner attracts the attention of someone you don't know but they do, and that person shouts out your name to ask you a trivial question.

I'm imagining a speech/thought bubble:

'Er… how do they know m…'

There's a social network in the works called micro.blog. It aims to bridge the gap between microblogging and longform blogging. Though I as a blogger-of-sorts see promise in the concept I didn't back it on Kickstarter. Nevertheless it raised over US$80,000 – something like 10x the stated goal? It'll likely be moderately popular.

But meh. The founder has delayed the first stage reward for the backers, pushing back the assignment of usernames until the roll-out of the first stage of the networking bits

Why didn't I back it? Simple really, the concept started off as a request for funds to assist in writing a book. Whether supplied by paper or electronic delivery I'm not certain, but it's a bit of an anachronism in this electronic age. No bother, the blogging/social aspect is intriguing, especially the desire to appoint a manager to stamp on trolls and antisocial behaviour. But I didn't back it because I already belong to an in-beta social, blogging, podcasting, etc., network: 10Centuries.org. You may already have seen that I like it a lot (and would like to invite you there.)

Oh, please disregard the fact that I've bought social/web books before in papery form too, namely Drew Curtis's about Fark.com and Philip Greenspun's about web publishing, and…

I've also been burned, er… ok singed a little, by a previous a Kickstarter campaign. For a twin-plate wallet.

The guy had iterated through innumerable designs, established materials, coatings, a supplier chain (with detailed discussions about tooling), and published a list of stretch goals for backer rewards, and gained multiple positive YouTube reviews…

And then the money arrived.

The materials changed, the suppliers changed, the coatings and production methods changed, the stretch goals were effectively eliminated as the previous costings were wiped out by all those changes.

And then, when the wallets were made available for sale months before delivery to Kickstarter backers, the recriminations started mounting. Obviously. There's such a thing as retaining the attention of those who back you, keeping the momentum going.

Accuse me of sour grapes if you wish, but another social network??

A reminder: App.net shuts down in a week-and-a-half.

No, not an insult. Why, when it's absolutely necessary to have a bag for collecting poo, there isn't one? Why, when it doesn't matter, is one's pocket full of the things, often bags sliding languidly to the floor when rummaging for keys, cards, cash…?

No social faux-pas here though whatever the circumstances, it's never particularly awkward; there are many dog owners out there with a similar sense of responsibility.

To avoid the embarrassment, the angst of returning to the scene of an 'incident' there has to be a better way of remembering allied to a better, more discreet method of poo bag concealed carry.

Today, a day of nerdy firsts: I had my first-ever Telnet session, and very tentatively started to play in my first-ever MUD. Bear in mind I've been on the Internet since March 1997; that's twenty years! It's interesting to note that both Telnet and the MUD precede my arrival in the slow lane of the Information Superhighway.

But first, these snippets from Wikipedia:

"Telnet is a protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communication facility using a virtual terminal connection."

…and:

"A MUD (originally Multi-User Dungeon, with later variants Multi-User Dimension and Multi-User Domain), is a multiplayer real-time virtual world, usually text-based. MUDs combine elements of role-playing games, hack and slash, player versus player, interactive fiction, and online chat."

Telnet, first mentioned in RFC#15 in 1969, is almost as old as I, predating the World Wide Web by an easy twenty years! The Colossal Cave Adventure first appeared in 1975, is itself no spring chicken!

Me: I played a few text-only adventure games starting in the early 1980s, but all were stand-alone single-user relying purely on the imagination of the programmer(s) and the user (me!) My all-time favourites: The Hobbit, The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and Zork (a game I never finished.)

You may have seen the game I ran with @mlv in an App.net thread, a flavour of which is available through the transcript here. A very enjoyable, diverting few months.

So there it is. Thanks very much indeed to @papierzeit on the pnut.io network for posting your server details and allowing me to have a go! I'll be back.

Sharing imaginations, it's amazing!