Leo Laporte hosted a very interesting round table on TWiTLive after taping this week’s TWiT about the current state of microblogging and the direction it should take in the future. Leo taped it, and I believe he plans to post it as a podcast.
It was an interesting conversation and one of the things that became evident quickly is that microblogs are different things to different people and that people’s views on what they are evolve overtime. For many people, they are simply a sindication service of their friends posts. For others, it’s really an IM system with a public datastream that can be mined in interesting ways. The former crowd are happy with the current state of things; the latter found that Twitter lost all of its usefulness when the XMPP interface and its track command went away. I fall in this latter camp, and I think that the current set of closed ecosystems will never be able to scale to google or yahoo size bacause they are designed as database driven websites first, possibly with a messaging system tacked on.
The other thing I found interesting was how much time they spent talking about federation between services. This is part of the XMPP specification. It is a problem that has already been solved if everyone will just talk XMPP. In fact, because any XMPP server is essentially an XML router, it has the capability to support multiple message schemas simulaneously. This would allow you to, say, route the text message from your Pownce feed to Twitter, as they are compatible, but not pictures, videos, or longer message that are not.
I’m encourage by the direction projects like Laconica are taking. This are designed as messaging systems first. Thus, providing that datastreams the can drive the websites, search engines, and special purpose clients that will eventually meet the needs of both camps. In the end, I hope that somehow an open pipe can be created between these closed systems. It will result in richer conversations and more complete data mining.
