Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Joe Cascio leads us in a discussion of distributed microblogging:

Twitter is a very popular so-called microblogging service. It allows you post short (140 characters max) messages that answer the question “What are you doing?”. These messages are broadcast to the other Twitter members that are “following” you, ie. have subscribed to your updates. And likewise, you receive all the messages from all the people you have chosen to follow. One particularly popular feature of Twitter is its ability to send and receives updates from mobile phones, Instant Messenger as well as Twitter’s web site and purpose-built UI programs like Twhirl.

But Twitter is also a proprietary “walled garden”, albeit open to anyone who wants to sign up. And it’s notoriously unreliable. In this talk we’ll discuss attempts in the developer community to decentralize and distribute Twitter using an open protocol to address the issues inherent to centralize, walled implementations. I am hoping this will lead to a wider discussion of open distributed systems and ways to preserve the social community benefits of a centralized system.

Afterward, go to a prom-themed contradance so you have something unusual to blog.

Upcoming meetings & events of interest:

• June 7-8: OLPC grassroots unconference
• June 29: DevHouse Boston 4
• July 19 & 20: PodCamp at Harvard Medical School
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.