I had the TWiTLive stream of Bear Hug Camp playing in the background for a great deal of the afternoon. At first I thought it was going to be a train wreck. Steve Gilmore as the moderator in the beginning was a poor choice. I know he was an organizer of the get together, but his opinions are far to strong on the matter to be impartial or even patient with those who might have other opinions. I think the limited time with the Twitter guys could have been more productively spent than everyone listening to him berate them for taking his track away and hearing how he must get back otherwise the dastardly Republicans will keep the White House. Does he really think the Twitterverse is that big or important?
Much to my surprise, the conference quickly redeemed itself. The “Big Thinkers” eventually shut up and let the tech guy start to work out the details. In addition to the Twitter guys, who couldn’t return after lunch, there were representatives from Google, Seesmic, Microsoft, Facebook, Identispy, and others. Evan Prodromou, of Identica and Laconica, presented his Open Micro Blogging specification and he and the other began to hash out the details of how these social communities can share their event streams and how aggregators can add value and federation for everyone.
I still think there is an awful lot of reinventing the wheel here. As one of the participant pointed out on more than one occasion, many things that Evan is trying to formalize, like federation, are already solve with XMPP and the XEPs. As I’ve stated before, I think it would make much more sense to build the whole infrastructure on XMPP. The web is really just a presentation interface, and this is really micro messaging, not microblogging. Imagine, XMPP routers routing messages of various XML schemas to you based on your criteria, your client renders them for you based on XSL transformations that you specify, and if your client can render that schema then it knows how and to whom you can respond if you wish to participate in the conversation. It’s got a long way to go, but there some really potential here to change both the web and messaging.
