The Real McCrea

Last evening, many of the developers of the Social Web came together in Palo Alto for a Tornado Tech Talk at Facebook. The event delivered a one-two punch from two heavy hitters who recently joined Facebook — David Recordon, the open technology leader and advocate, and Bret Taylor, of the recently-acquired FriendFeed (where Tornado was developed).

What’s Tornado? David Recordon says:

Tornado is a relatively simple, non-blocking Web server framework written in Python. It’s designed to handle thousands of simultaneous connections, making it ideal for real-time Web services.

(Oh, and the big deal is that it has been open-sourced, so that anyone can benefit from the many innovations developed originally for FriendFeed.)

It was a really great event. Bret Taylor is one impressive individual — deeply technical, a great communicator, and someone with a very coherent world view and philosophy for developing product.

David Recordon has more details (including Bret’s slides) on his post, Talking about Tornado. And Caroline McCarthy of CNET puts it into perspective with her post, Facebook wastes no time putting FriendFeed to work.

All-in-all, this is a great sign of the continued movement toward an open and interoperable Social Web. I applaud Facebook’s continued moves toward greater openness. And it’s clear that David Recordon and the FriendFeed team are a great addition to the mix!

[UPDATE: Bret has a post up now that, along with the slides, embeds the full video of the talk!]