NewsGang Live on TechCrunch
Today marks the debut of the daily NewsGang Live series on TechCrunch, where every day at 1PM Pacific 4PM Eastern we record an open conversation with members of what we call the TwitterGang. These folks include members of The Gillmor Gang, industry players, media analysts, and anyone who chooses to call in and participate.
As usual, today’s show wanders from the presidential race to the weekend’s Twitter outage (still limping at post time) to some new Facebook technology we are going to experiment with to organize the audio part of the conference call. We’ve been lucky enough to have the support of Jerry Schuman and his Ustream simulcast for the past few weeks enabling people to listen in on the Web and chat in realtime, and now with the show hosted on TechCrunch, we’ll be bringing that simulcast onto this site and integrating it with the new audio tools.
NewsGang Live came about as an outgrowth of Jason Calacanis’ hijacking of an episode of The Gang, where he gave out the call-in number on Twitter and a guy named Larry ended up in the clubhouse for the rest of the show. Now, with the live Ustream gateway and the rapid growth of Twitter, the show represents an interactive laboratory where we move from idea to implementation to deployment, sometimes in the course of a single show.
The intersting part about today’s Twitter outage (and today’s show) has been the relative viability of the Gtalk/Twitter gateway, where a realtime stream of Twitter messages has combined with the unique Track command to stay up while Web and third party clients such as Twhirl have broken down. The effect of this rolling blackout has been to encourage a number of enterprise gurus decrying the stability and reliability of the platform, but those who have been following the show and my arbitrary attacks on the @reply methodology are the only ones left with a robust platform. With Microsoft coming to the party over the next several days here in San Francisco with their Mesh services, the resultant rollup of Twitter, Mesh, and the SIlverlight platform is ready to present a compelling alternative (and load-balancing choice) to the Google gateway services.
