Bear Hug Camp: a microblogging meetup
CBS Interactive hosted a meetup about the state of microblogging. Bear Hug Camp is about discussing the future of messaging.
People use Twitter as a way to communicate and stay in touch with their audience. It's not always reliable though.
Features that made Twitter special, like the ability to use IM and being able to track certain keywords, have vanished. New microblogging platforms have sprung up that have these features and more. And they're open source. The only thing they are missing is the community.
Some of the most influential industry minds were in attendance today, and I took some notes that I would like to share with you:
Steve Gillmor, blogger and podcaster: Moving from idea to implementation is rapid now. If you have the power and don't use it, you lose it.
Leo Laporte, tech podcaster: What we really want is unsiloed content. We want the content on these services to be available to 3rd parties.
Dave Winer, blogger: We are waiting for Twitter to turn back on XMPP, and it's taking a long time.
Twitter's solution to this problem is pushing the public timeline to a third party called Gnip.
Evan Prodromou, creator of Laconica: There are hundreds of micro-blogging services. How can we make "track" work with millions of nodes on this network.
Gillmor: This is a political effort.
Prodromou: Back in the day, AOL was the main provider of email. Eventually, others came along, and it split up. We are at that stage with Twitter now.
Winer: We need gateways. Give me a way to attach a chunk of data to a message. Twitter doesn't do that, they're not innovators anymore.
Loïc LeMeur, Seesmic & Twhirl: Twhirl now supports Laconica. We want to support Facebook status one day.
Jack Dorsey: We have been focusing a lot of our energy on scalability. We don't feel comfortable putting out a feature that we can't fully support. Track and IM are very close.
Gillmor: When's track coming back?
Dorsey: One reason we came to this event is to see how the community can help.
Alex Payne: We have engineers working right now to replicate the track feature using our API.
