We delayed last week’s shooting of the Social Web TV by a day, so that we could discuss Thursday evening’s Activity Streams Meetup. The episode is now up, and it’s practically bursting at the seams with open Social Web goodness. Chris Messina, David Recordon, Joseph Smarr and I are all on hand to discuss lots of recent news, doing mashups right, and the Activity Streams Meetup. Check it out:
The Real McCrea
John McCrea on the exponential wiring up of humanity
Tag Archives: Chris Messina
Looking Forward: Taking it to the Streets
It’s official. I’m launching a “tv” show, along with Joseph Smarr, David Recordon, and Chris Messina. It will be called, “The Social Web.” (TV!)
The first episode is going to air a week from tomorrow.
Yep. There’s a lot still to work out, but I hope you tune in. Our goal is to help mainstream Internet users feel connected to the mission of opening up th social web.
You can check out the pilot here.
Oh, yeah. And please leave comments suggesting topics or guests you’d like ti see!
Identi.ca: an Open Source, Federated Twitter Alternative
I’m here to talk about Identi.ca, who have great writeups by many leading lights, including ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick and VentureBeat’s MG Siegler (very clever, for sure).
Twitter, the increasingly vital information utility for the digerati, enjoys a love-hate relationship with its addicted user base, due to its unending series of outages. Many have called for an alternative to emerge, especially one that might have a distributed or federated approach to enable scaling with fault-tolerance.
With yesterday’s launch of social media feed utility service, Gnip, who were unable to secure an XMPP feed from Twitter in time for their debut, that chorus began to rise. Enter Identi.ca, a full-on Twitter clone with an open source, federated twist.
Is this a big deal? It’s certainly way too soon to tell. But Twitter’s strength to-date has been winning passionate loyalty from the super-connected early adopters, and those are exactly the people who are jumping on to Identi.ca’s train (at least for exploration’s sake).
My take? First, a confession. I am jealous of my friend Chris Messina, who has thousands of followers on Twitter. I have just a little over 500. Why? (Aside from the fact that Chris is truly deserving of a large audience?) [Full disclosure: Chris is the newest member of the “Social Web Fab Four” on the TV show that we’re launching next week. Check out the pilot here.] A key part of the reason I have so few followers is that I was late to adopt Twitter. Yep. I just didn’t get the power of microblogging until after the early adopter land-grab was over.
Okay, so basically, my sense is that is happening all over again. And my advice is that if you love Twitter (but wish you had more followers), you may want to invest some time now in helping build up Identi.ca. Yes, you’ll have to put up with climbing over some scaffolding, as this is clearly a work-in-progress.
But, go ahead. Jump in. Oh, yes, and “subscribe” to me, please. 🙂
I’m johnmccrea there.
The Real McCrea 