[music]

Gillmor: Yesterday we had a wide-ranging discussion about a number of things Twitter-related. Friend Feed, etcetera, with Scoble and Jason Calcanis and Mr. Canter, who was on that call as well. That call ended rather abruptly, but I wanted to continue what we were talking about, which had moved into a topic that I’d talked with Mike Arrington and Chris Saad about as a result of Mike Arrington’s post recently. I believe it was in the middle of the week, regarding Dave Weiner’s commentary on decentralizing Twitter.

And in the research for the show, I’ve noticed that Dave and Marc have had a bit of an interchange about this as well on Marc’s sight.

Canter: Absolutely.

Gillmor: So I want to start with Marc Canter. Could you define what we were talking about at the end of the show yesterday, your concerns about — well, can you define what your concerns are? And then we’ll go from there.

Canter: Sure, no problem. What we’ve got is a situation where the latest, hottest trend — in this case, Twitter — has positioned itself as infrastructure that many different apps and services can be built on top of it. That’s one of the things Dave Weiner has done and many others have done.

And at that time when this happened, it was about a year ago, I cautioned that if you guys start committing to a platform that in itself is great — and don’t get me wrong, Twitter is a wonderful platform — but it’s provided by one vendor. It is controlled by Evan Williams and Tread Wilson and the people who funded it.

Now, we know that their end game is to sell the platform for a lot of money. And eventually it will end up in the hands of one of these big cos. Right. But the challenge here — and Steve Gillmor’s pointed out all the wonderful, incredible things that can be done with Twitter. It seems like my job to be the naysayer and say, “Look, I love Twitter, whatever.”

But there could be technically 100 Twitters, each controlled by different vendors, and we could have a backend kind of DNS thing to federate users. So if I registered with Pownce or Jaiku, my handle would work on Twitter, or vice-versa. And that’s what I’ve been saying.

Now, Dave Weiner’s approach is a little different. I don’t believe he necessarily supports that approach. Dave, of course, can correct me. I think what he’s more about is, let’s back up the data that’s flowing over Twitter and put that in a place where that would connect us to data.

Because I think Dave is thinks it’s too idealistic to think that we could get DNS federation of 100 different Twitters, but right now he is backing up the data. [laughs] So that’s the two different approaches I think that are on the table.

And of course what we were talking about yesterday on the call was, this is all bullshit and who the hell cares about Twitter? Or, just leave them alone or whatever. Get on with the next one, guys.

Gillmor: Who are you characterizing there?

Canter: I couldn’t even remember. I can’t remember who’s…

Gillmor: Are you saying you don’t care?

Canter: Oh, no. I absolutely care.

Gillmor: OK. I don’t know that there was anybody that was saying that they didn’t care.

All right, now — and it was in that context and, again, we’re representing what Dave Weiner has to say about this. I’m not in touch with Dave Weiner directly, because he blocked me several weeks ago, and hasn’t really been maintaining any kind of communication with me other than a piece of email that he sent last night, which seemed to be more a statement rather than any kind of conversation.

So he has a lot to say about this subject, had been saying it for a long time. And the best we can do, I think, is to try and represent what he has to say. If anybody wants to signal him on various transports and suggest that he come on the show, he’d be more than welcome. But in any case, regardless of whether he shows up or not, we’re going to talk about this.

So, Chris Saad, could you sort of detail the genesis of the conversation that you had with Mike Arrington, and how that led to the post on TechCrunch that Mike put up a few days ago?

Saad: Sure. There was obviously a little bit of buzz on the blogosphere from Dave Weiner and others, who was saying that Twitter was going up and down like a yoyo, and it was one vendor, and there should possibly be a decentralized version and how would that look like, and that sort of thing. [00:05:08]

Mike and I were discussing that, and I had mentioned to him that actually in my team in my company at Faraday Media, we had just been thinking and talking about that as a thought experiment for the last year. For no other reason, just to think about how our technology could be lent to that ecosystem while still making it open standards and something that anyone could play and participate in.

And the result of that was to use existing sort of patterns of behavior that we saw on the Web and just adding very small layers of thinking to it. So I don’t really think that the solution is all too complicated. I think that we could just look at the blogging ecosystem and literally just think about is as micro-blogging with a real-time component.

And this is something that me and my team have come up with, so it’s not all my idea, but the idea that if you created a WordPress type app that limited your post to 140 characters, then you’re producing what is effectively micro-blogs. How that differs from Twitter is, A) it’s real time, and B) there’s an SMS gateway.

So the real-time component — Twitter itself uses this — we could use XMPP, but the trick is XMPP is a much tougher thing to code to and work out. So we actually internally at our company had built an RSS to XMPP bridge. So you would just create and RSS feed, you would register it with this service, and every time you update the RSS feed, you just ping this service.

This is your own thing; you’re running it on your own server. You ping it, and it would broadcast and XMPP ping or a Web Hook ping or any sort of notification with the change to all the registered clients that cared about it.

So what you’re doing is you’re effectively just recreating — you’re just taking blogging, you’re limiting it to 144 characters, and you’re adding XMPP on top. And you’ve got real-time micro-blogging.

Gillmor: All right. So, Bob Lee, are you there?

Lee: I’m here.

Gillmor: All right, so Bob — just for the audience’s information — is an engineer at Google and the author of “Trouble,” which the utility and viral spread of which eludes me, but I’m sure that it’s very exciting. Right?

Lee: Yep.

Gillmor: Bob has been working with the Twitter API, I would imagine, correct?

Lee: Correct.

Gillmor: And do you also have a working knowledge — at least for the sake of the audience here — a working knowledge of the issues of XMPP and how that might be interacting between the Google GTalk gateway and Twitter?

Lee: Yes.

Gillmor: OK. So can you unpack what Chris just said in the context of what we think Dave Weiner’s talking about with — from what I can understand –basically taking an RSS and using it as transport for the Twitter messages?

Lee: I think Dave Weiner’s just biting off a small piece right now.

Gillmor: OK. You’re going to have to speak up a little bit. It’s hard to hear you.

Lee: OK. I think Dave Weiner’s just starting off by biting off a small piece. And I think that’s probably a good approach. He’s only taking care of the backup aspect right now, right? Is that correct?

Canter: Yeah.

Lee: He’s not really tackling the real-time kind of part, which you guys were talking about.

Canter: Not at all.

Gillmor: Who’s saying, “Not at all.”

Canter: Me. Marc.

Gillmor: Thank you. Just trying to help the transcribers a little bit. If you can say who it is when you state something.

Canter: Sorry. I’ll be the guy blurting out.

Gillmor: I’m just saying to everybody. Just say who it is so that we can help ease the transcribers later on.

Saad: This is Chris here. I just forgot to mention that that would obviously move a lot of the work of bringing the stream back together to the aggregator. I forgot to mention that piece, and very much like in the blogging ecosystem, now you need Google Read or NewsGator or whatever. You need to rely more on the Twirls of the world to then be XMPP listeners, to subscribe to each micro-blog you care about and aggregate it in.

Which I don’t think is a problem. I think that’s exactly how it should work and how everything else works. So, yeah, I just forgot to mention that piece.

Gillmor: All right. So, Bob, do you think, yes, incrementalism is always better than some sort of boiling of the ocean, correct?

Lee: It’s a good way to get things done. But it is fun to — we do still need to talk about where we think we need to go. [00:10:04]

Gillmor: My concerns with Dave Weiner’s suggestions is that no matter how you frame it, it still comes down to — in the case of initial suggestions — it comes down to a server that he’s going to contribute to capture this data, and then move it around the network. Why is that any less centralized than what Twitter’s doing?

Lee: It gets away from a single point of failure at least.

Gillmor: Yeah. But I mean, as to the point…

Lee: It’s not the ultimate solution, though. You’re right.

Gillmor: And to the point that Chris just made, Twirl, for example, is already doing this and so are a number of other services. I mean, Friend Feed is capturing all the Twitter streams and moving them around the network as well. So I’m just not sure what…

Saad: Yeah, I don’t think backup is necessarily the problem right now.

Canter: This is Mark. If you’re going to incrementally approach the problem, you take on piece at a time. So that particular piece that David’s done is backup. That’s perfectly reasonable. It’s just that we want a distributed thing, and I think what Steve is saying is, “Hey, we’re already distributed anyway, what’s the big deal?”

I think the point is that in a distributed world, in an open meshed world, there’s going to be multiple paths to the same direction. If Robert Scoble wants to…

Gillmor: No, there’s no dispute about that. There’s no dispute about that, Marc.

Canter: OK. So let’s get back to…

Gillmor: The issue from my perspective about that, being able to express the desire to decentralize is certainly a laudable goal. And the more end points that are in the mix, that are not under the control of one business, the better.

But beyond that, what exactly are people proposing. I still don’t understand what Chris is talking about in terms of taking this RSS feed — which by definition, as far as I can tell, is a store and forward approach, therefore it’s much more latent than the XMPP approach that is currently being used by Google to push a real-time stream of Twitter messages. Which I consider to be the most interesting and useful expression of the Twitter stream.

Anderson: Steve, this is Robert Anderson.

Gillmor: Yeah.

Anderson: I think we just need to separate the two issues of Dave Weiner wanting to have some kind of a backup system at this stage and whether that’s incrementalism or not. And the bigger issue that I think most Twitter people have is that it’s not up all the time.

And those are two completely different things. The backup part, I think isn’t very interesting. I certainly understand very well the issue of being able to get your data out of the system and have it be there when you want it, but that’s completely separate from it being up for us to host or update.

Saad: And different from trying to build a distributed version of Twitter. They’re not the same thing.

Anderson: Right, yes. But we go into the up time issue and being able to post our updates, and we can separate that out into what can we do to get Twitter to be up, or what can we do to instead of Twitter in terms of having a distributed system with different protocols or something that replaces it.

I think that when we talk about completely different systems for it, like the micro-blogging perspective that Chris Saad just told us, that’s a different thing than Twitter all together. And that, to me, isn’t incrementalism, that’s replacing it.

Canter: And wouldn’t we be able to seamlessly, if we could, there would also be a technique of having different implementation of, let’s call it a Twitter protocol or whatever it is, that uses XMPP as a real-time backbone and then would have DNS for registered users.

So if you registered with Jaiku or Pownce, you could work and log in and work on any of these other ones. So if one of them went down, you would be able to use one of the other systems with your followers on a completely different system. If one of the ones went down. Isn’t that possible?

Gillmor: So Bob, do you think — Bob? Bob?

Lee: Yes.

Anderson: Can I ask Marc a follow up question on that?

Gillmor: No. I want to ask Bob to comment on what Marc just said.

[laughter]

Gillmor: Is that a viable solution? And given the current infrastructure, is that doable or even politically possible?

Lee: The thing that’s kind of running through my head, it sounds like we already kind of have a backup deal, to even post messages to friends.

Gillmor: You have to speak up. It’s just impossible to hear you.

Lee: Sorry about that. We already have backups in the sense that you can post a friend sheet in Pownce and stuff like that, but they don’t have this XMPP component, right? [00:15:09]

Gillmor: Correct.

Lee: They don’t have the live component, the live messaging.

Gillmor: And Twirl is in the process of building out just such an XMPP component.

Lee: Are they building the server side or…?

Gillmor: Yeah. They’re tapping into the Jabber framework and are going to produce the same affect as what Google is currently doing.

Lee: Oh, cool idea. So you’ve got the real-time messages coming in.

Gillmor: And the track functionality, which I think is the other key aspect of this network.

Lee: Very cool. So it sounds like I agree with them that the issue is just like, where do the people that I follow get stored? How do I keep track of that.

Gillmor: And the other issue that Marc is mentioning is that this so-called DNS exposure to the..

Saad: I have to disagree with Marc on that idea, in terms of I don’t think it’s actually that complicated. I think that it could look exactly like blogs look today, with and XMPP layer on top. So the idea that you need to register uses and have a DNS there, that’s been handled for us already. It’s called DNS.

Every blog has a unique URL, and if you’re blogging from a URL, then that’s your unique identifier. And the blog already…

Gillmor: Chris, before you go too far down this road, Robert Anderson has basically suggested that what you’re talking about is not an incremental approach, but rather a replacement.

Saad: I’m not saying that it’s one or the other. But Marc’s is a replacement as well. It’s going one step further. And I don’t think we need to go one step further. I don’t think we need to rebuild the DNS system for the unique identifier, that’s all.

Canter: Can I weigh in here right now and respond to Chris? OK. Now, Chris, you know of this thing called MyBlogRoll?

Saad: My Blog What? Rule?

Gillmor: MyBlogLog?

Canter: MyBlogLog, yes. Sorry. MyBlogLog.

Saad: [laughs] Yes. MyBlogLog.

Canter: Something with mayonnaise and ketchup. Now as some of us know from this phone call, before social networking, when one would create a blog roll on the side of their blog page, that was your online community. It was very loosely coupled, but many, many blog posts were written all about “my community” and “my gutter” in 2002 and 2003.

And when social networking came along, it replaced blog rolls as the predominated way that people declared their friends and followers. And nowadays Twitter and Friend Feed have taken that to the next stage.

But what you’re mechanism that you’re proposing doesn’t handle is my list of friends and followers.

Saad: Oh, I have an answer for you for that one as well.

Canter: Beautiful, beautiful. Tell me.

Saad: I actually proposed this a little while ago. I’m not sure if I ever published it, but I proposed it in my own head, anyway. The idea was — and I actually think this is much more scalable, it’s much more truly representative of what’s going on — we have suggested and proposed a protocol called “Get Pinged, ” which is a discovery mechanism for discovering an XMPP end point and how you would get notifications of updates, particularly pushed notifications.

And it’s at getpingd.com without the last “e” because we’re all Web 2.0 here. So what I would suggest actually is in the ping, where you subscribe to notifications, you actually declare yourself at that point. So you would say — you’ve passed something along with the requests for the RSS feed or the update — and you would pass along some identification.

Just like FeedBurner and count how many people are reading a feed, the user can optionally pass along some ID with that ping, and then FeedBurner or whoever is managing your feed can display who pinged your feed in the last day.

And that would actually be a much more accurate representation of who’s actually following a feed. And it would be decentralized. You wouldn’t need a new DNS and you wouldn’t need a whole new infrastructure.

So I think that’s one way of solving it, is as you request the update, you leave a breadcrumb behind about who you are.

Canter: But where’s the persistent list of friends? Where is your list of friends? Where is that stored?

Saad: The list of friends that you’re tracking would be in the aggregator, just like it’s a list of feeds you’re reading. The list of friends to sort of display on your sidebar as bling — “Who’s following me” — that would be tracked by FeedBurner of whatever is turning your RSS into XMPP. And it would…

Gillmor: So instead of having Twitter track who I’m following, you’re suggesting that Google do it?

Saad: No, I’m suggesting that an aggregator do it.

Gillmor: FeedBurner is a Google service.

Arrington: He’s using FeedBurner as an example. Right? [00:20:05]

Canter: Yeah. The followers become a dynamic list. It’s only whatever you’re looking at, at the time.

Gillmor: All right. So, Doc Searls, are you there?

Searls: Yeah, I’m here. I just had my microphone twisted away. [laughs] So, I’ve been listening. It’s like really great radio. I was sort of feeling like I’m listening to a really great public station.

Gillmor: Well, it will get really great once somebody like me can understand about a tenth of it.

Searls: [laughs] OK, here’s a couple of interesting thoughts that may or may not be related. One is that I soon as I heard XMPP being involved in this, then other open stuff like SNTP and so on. It makes me happy because I don’t want to see the kind of stuff Twitter does and Pownce does or that anybody does, sitting in anybody’s silo.

And some like the anti-silo guy and — I mean, I was around the whole Jabber movement that XMPP came out of and I’m glad to see it being applied in places like this, even though it’s still not universal in the area where it was intended in the first place, which is instant messaging which is still highly siloed.

So, if what Twitter and Pownce do best can operate inside a larger market that has a name other than their brands, that would be really cool. I’ve been sitting here trying to think, what’s a name for that? Is it 140ing? Or something like…

Gillmor: I think it’s called fantasy.

Searls: No. I mean, if this is a category of activity on the net, you ought to have a name for what it is. Like, mail has a name and instant messaging has a name and blogging has a name. I don’t think it ought to get tied up in just one implementation of something, right? I had a really interesting conversation with somebody in Toronto yesterday. And he’s involved, he’s got a company. I’m not going to say what it is, but a couple of his programmers are committers on WordPress and we talked about bringing outlining to blogging, which is something I’ve always wanted.

I mean, I’ve wanted a real outlining to come to blogging for a long time. There’s a part of it with OMPL, but I want it to work like IncTec or more work. I’ve always wanted that to happen. I’ve wanted that to happen in word processing as well.

Gillmor: So, the reason that I — I know you’ve been lurking for a while here and feel free anytime just to go back and listen.

Searls: Yeah.

Gillmor: The reason I wanted to bring you in here is just that I always see this dichotomy between what should be or what we all think should be the way things work. And the way things work, I’m not trying to debunk the notion that… Well, I’m actually trying to debunk the notion, but that’s what this is for. So, I think it’s an absolute nonsense.

Searls: [laughs]

Gillmor: But let’s say, for a second, since everybody else on this call seems to think that it’s important, that it’s a laudable goal. On the other hand, we’re faced with this utility that are what people call this proprietary service that has outstripped by far its original goals and its utility for many of us like me, it’s taking up 78% of my time.

Searls: This utility being Twitter?

Gillmor: Yeah.

Searls: OK.

Gillmor: I mean, Twitter is, to me, the dominant service on my machine at this point.

Searls: Oh.

Gillmor: It has been for several months.

Searls: It takes about half of 1% of my time.

Gillmor: I understand.

Canter: Can I say something? Can I say something here?

Searls: I want to hear Steve finish.

Canter: All right. Go ahead, Steve.

Gillmor: Who was that? Was that Chris?

Canter: My name is Marc. No, this is Marc Canter.

Gillmor: Oh, I’m sorry, Marc. Go ahead. Believe me, we’ll keep talking.

Canter: I think we have a unique opportunity with somebody like Doc who doesn’t use social networking, who doesn’t use Twitter, but yet is very much a leader in this area. And when I thought of Facebook, when I looked at the open platform of Facebook, I felt it was an incredible step forward and it went 98% of the way to nirvana, right? And that last 2% where they retained control over the user’s data is what makes this type of closed platform.

You can have an open platform for developers to come in and to monetize, but if they’re locking that user’s data, they haven’t gone far enough.

Gillmor: Marc, you could also make the case that that lock-in — which I don’t agree exists, but let’s say that it does — that it’s spawned… I know you two both agree vehemently about this. I mean, trying to get you to use Facebook for any purposes whatsoever, I’ve long since given up on. [00:25:15]

Searls: I hate it, I really hate it. I have to say.

Gillmor: I understand that and I’m not going to argue that point. What I am going to say is just that if that is what it has done to retard its approach to nirvana, at the same time, it incentivized what Twitter has accomplished. Twitter just drove through that hole and created this enormous leverage.

Searls: Yeah, but it’s still, to me, Facebook versus Twitter at a certain level, and I’ll be the total broken record on this, is still vendor sports. I think Facebook and Twitter both prototyped something that needs fundamentally to be open and should have big backend utilities in the Nick Carr sense of that word, doing them better than anybody else does.

Just like search is open. I mean, nobody owns search. Anybody can do a search. Google has to do better.

Gillmor: You’ve got to be kidding me. You’ve got to be kidding me, that search is open.

Searls: Why would I kid you? Why would I kid you? Just to… [laughs]

Gillmor: Just to be Doc Searls, I think.

Searls: [laughs]

Canter: Doc, people would say that Google owns search, right?

Searls: Well, the reason that Google owns search is because the competition is lame and weak and stupid. That’s why. And chicken shit.

Gillmor: I don’t think that…

Searls: That’s why they own search, it’s by default. For God’s sake! It’s by default.

Canter: Can we go back to Twitter for a sec?

Gillmor: It’s by acquiescence on the part of millions of people.

Searls: Acquiescence on the part of their competitors as well. Google succeeded because Microsoft and Yahoo and other people in that space failed.

Gillmor: Human aggregates…

Searls: And that’s the full credit to Google for doing what it does well. OK? I’m not saying Google is bad…

Canter: It’s not on purpose, it didn’t purposely fail.

Searls: And I don’t hate Google, by the way. I like Google.

Canter: It didn’t purposely fail. It didn’t purposely fail, it’s not their choice.

Searls: Sure.

Gillmor: We aggregate around what somebody called standards at the beginning of this show. We aggregate around these things.

Searls: Who aggregated around what standards?

Gillmor: What?

Searls: Who aggregated around what standards?

Gillmor: People do, and people like — I mean, I aggregated around Office because I was sick to death of trying to figure out what the balance of power was between Ami Pro and WordPerfect and Word and all that kind of crap. But at some point, I said, “Hey, this one’s better. This one’s good enough. It’s cheaper. Yes, it’s going to create a dominant position for Microsoft. So be it. I’m going to buy it.”

Searls: Right. And that’s fine. So what? What’s your point?

Gillmor: Well, my point is just that that’s what’s happening with Twitter right now.

Searls: Oh sure. But that’s what happened to MySpace and it’s what happened to a bunch of things. But it’s not the end of time for any of those or with Google, so…

Gillmor: No, but to say that we all are trending toward… I mean, the Republican philosophy is just that the market will decide and as much as I’m in favor of Obama and the Democrats, I actually agree with that scenario, which is that the market tends to even out the bumps along the road toward innovation.

Searls: Sure.

Gillmor: OK. So, I don’t see what the problem is here. Decentralization is a laudable goal. It’s also science fiction.

Searls: Well, it’s both.

Gillmor: There’s no decentralized solution because it’s not going to have a control point, be definition.

Searls: Well, essentially it’s just that you have many, many more control points. I mean, the net itself in 1984 would have been absolute science fiction. But now, it’s not.

Gillmor: I agree.

Searls: There are lots of control points, but they’re different control points. There’s no one company running the control points.

Gillmor: We have many control points. We have lots of control points right now. Frenzy is a control point, Twirl is a control point. What Dave Weiner is proposing is a control point. They’re all control points. To be able to suggest that one of these ideas or solutions has some sort of endowment of credibility from a “kumbaya” perspective I think is bullshit.

Searls: OK. Well, what makes you think I’m thinking a kumbaya perspective?

Gillmor: I don’t. I’m attacking the world, not you personally.

Searls: OK. I’ll step aside for the world and let them take the hit.

Canter: OK, I would like to sing “Kumbaya” first and I would like to say that Chris Saad’s proposal sounds totally coolio. That anything Google comes up with, it can mesh in is totally coolio. And we love Microsoft and Yahoo, we want them to mesh in. OK?

Evan Williams ain’t going away, and Loek Essers. Everybody is going to mesh in. And that’s all we are talking about, - having different channels. And may the best brand and the best compelling experience win. That’s all. [00:30:00]

Gillmor: That’s what’s happening. Yeah, sounds good.

Saad: I don’t really think what I am proposing is actually radical or amazing or science fiction. I think it is a very, very simple logical extension of what’s already happening. Micro-blogging is very popular, and all I am saying is look at what is micro-blogging at it’s fundamental core. It’s blogging with a sense of real-time on top and with some SMS gateways on top.

If we standardize the way that works, then others can implement it as well. That’s all.

Gillmor: So, in other words, there is no problem? We don’t have to worry about anybody in this space? Everything is fine?

Lee: Do we really need to even standardize as yet? Is there anybody that is really interested and doing the same thing as Twitter right now?

Gillmor: The only person who seems to be suggesting it is Dave Weiner. He is talking about contributing the server to be able to capture the RSS feeds, or convert the stream of Tweets into an RSS stream. It sounds like where Chris is talking about as applying, now that the work has been done, to take an RSS stream and convert it to XMPP. That’s one approach.

The other approach is to be able to bootstrap the existing XMPP gateway, as I call it. And that’s the approach that I believe Twirl is doing.

Saad: Great. I think better not.

Gillmor: I want to hear what Bob has to say, please.

Lee: I think we are not talking about technical problems here. What I need is a way to say, Steve Gillmor, I want you to broadcast your updates to me. And also, on top of that, I think I also might want some way to make that anonymous. So I can just stop receiving your updates, so you can’t spam me. Does that make sense?

Gillmor: Well, it would make sense if I could hear you.

Lee: Is there any way to make my handset louder?

Canter: It did make sense.

Gillmor: Press * for one more time.

Lee: Star what?

Gillmor: One more time.

Lee: Does that help at all?

Gillmor: Look, it is good enough for me because I am going to compress the hell out of the show. So we’ll be able to hear it.

Lee: I guess the problem for me is that, yeah, I just need some way to tell Steve Gillmor that I want you to start broadcasting the updates, and like RSS, I kind of want that relationship to be anonymous, so that I can just stop following you whenever, and not get spammed.

Gillmor: Alright, so what is it that happens now and what’s the difference?

Lee: Really, I guess I need some service that’s maybe tied to your OpenID or something like that, where I can just go and add or remove myself. When I say add or remove myself, I guess there has to be some kind of intermediate thing, almost kind of like anonymous email address or something like that. You know what I am saying?

Gillmor: No, what I am asking is that right now Twitter exists, and what happens on Twitter? Just model this with the current technology and then what you are trying to do, so we can determine what the delta is between the two ideas.

Yeah, so what happens right now with Twitter?

Lee: Right now, with Twitter, I follow you that Twitter controls the point of — it takes your updates and broadcasts simply. If I lose you, then I don’t receive your updates anymore. But if we try to decentralize this, and I just kind of subscribe to you, how do I tell you that I want to receive your updates? How do I tell you that I want you to broadcast to me?

Saad: Sure it’s simple. Why is that any different to an RSS subscription? I am not clear on that.

Lee: Well, RSS is pulling. We need something that…

Saad: Which is what I am saying. You wrap RSS in an XMPP notification.

Gillmor: But that doesn’t make sense.

Lee: That doesn’t solve the problem.

Saad: Why not?

Gillmor: Because you put it into RSS, which is a polling mechanism, which introduces latency, and then you put it on an XMPP transport which ratifies the latency of RSS.

Saad: There are ways — what I am saying is, everyone understands the…

Gillmor: Is there a streaming RSS format that you are aware of?

Saad: Actually, there is. The way Google does it. They have this sort of open connection to the RSS, and they are constantly reading it. And that’s how 6-Apart updates them so quickly.

Lee: Actually, RSS is just a format. It doesn’t really have anything to do with…

Saad: Yeah, that’s what I am saying.

Lee: RSS is more than a format. [00:35:04]

Gillmor: And I am going to make sure that if I don’t understand this, then I am going to stop you guys until I understand it. I am going to be proxy for the audience here.

Saad: All I’m saying is…

Gillmor: Hang on, Chris.

What I understand about RSS, forget about what it is called, is that I can subscribe to it and then from that point on, receive information as it is updated. Now, there is an interval between the time that I polled the last time for RSS, and then the next time that I poll for it. Right? That is a common form of RSS aggregation. To me, that has a tremendous amount of latency involved in it, which is not interesting to me.

Saad: Not only that, it doesn’t scale.

Gillmor: OK. So, Bob?

Saad: But I am not suggesting that.

Lee: I definitely agree with you on this.

Gillmor: OK, good. So, what are you suggesting? Are you suggesting something, Chris, that avoids that limitation?

Saad: For lack of a better word, I am suggesting push RSS.

Gillmor: OK, and does that exist on plan?

Saad: Well, it does as far as I am concerned. Because, it is simply RSS plus this little think stream thing that we wrote, which anyone else could write themselves. And you discover it using this open cross-standard way of proposing called getpingd. So, with those three things together, and none of which are proprietary because someone could write the proprietary bit themselves, for all we care, it turns polling of RSS into pushing of RSS.

RSS is simply the payload. You just forget the fact that you poll it right now. It is just a way of describing the data. But you can turn it into a push mechanism. It is very easy.

Gillmor: OK. Bob? Bob, is that accurate?

Lee: Well, just being able to push it isn’t the issue. I am talking beyond that. I want to be able to tell you to be able to push it to me. I don’t necessarily want you to know who I am, and I want to be able to stop you from pushing it to me. And right now we have Twitter as that kind of control point.

You are not sending instant messages directly to my GTalk account. You are sending them to Twitter and then Twitter is re-broadcasting it. So we have that control point.

Saad: Why can’t the aggregator be the control point?

Gillmor: Robert Anderson, could you answer that question?

Anderson: Well, yeah. What Chris Saad is saying is, why can’t there be multiple aggregators. Right?

Saad: That’s all I am saying.

Anderson: Right. But the fact that it is RSS, I think, is irrelevant. I don’t see why we are saying that. With RSS, you can just subscribe to it or not. It doesn’t matter that it is RSS. As you said, Chris, it is just the payload. It doesn’t matter how it is described internally.

Lee: Exactly.

Gillmor: OK, I understand that. If you look at the way Microsoft describes Mesh, they have a dropdown menu that supports a number of different payloads for the data — RSS, Atom, JSON, on and on.

Saad: Precisely.

Gillmor: OK. So, again, what I am looking for is a real-time, or so real-time that it appears real-time to me. I don’t care whether it really is real-time. I don’t think anything is real-time. There is always the delta between something happening and something being received.

Anderson: Real-time is a greatly bastardized term.

Gillmor: I understand. But it is like you can tell — you would know it when you see it. And right now the only place I see it is on the Google GTalk gateway. Something that looks like that, that also, from what we are talking about here, has the additional capabilities of granularity around essentially the social graph aspects of it; which is what Bob is talking about, I think also Marc is talking about. Correct?

Canter: Yeah.

Gillmor: OK. So, any of the technologists here want to tell us how that could be modeled, so that we can move forward?

Lee: Well, actually, I do have some ideas in that regard too I mean, the spam is already been solved to some extent with IRC. Unlike the IRC model, is that you have networks. You can think of like our whole micro-blogging area is a network. But there are tons of servers and each server has a certain number of connections or certain number of users connected and all those servers kind of broadcast all the messages to each other. [00:39:56]

So you could conceivably think about some other service that is just like Twitter and that provides all the same features, kind of we are talking about the XMPP broadcasting and maybe even the SMS gateway, maybe even some other stuff that we haven’t even thought of, but if something was going to happen and then that service and Twitter, I would think it is really simple, would just have a pipe in between the two, right?

Gillmor: Right.

Saad: I do think that you could go with the IRC model and have Twitter service, for lack of a better word, but I don’t think IRC is the perfect model to look out. I also said before I think blogging is the perfect model.

Lee: I don’t understand.

Saad: Well with blogging, you don’t need to go through a server, you go straight from the provider to an aggregator; you don’t need a server in the middle.

Gillmor: First of all that is not true, every blog has a server.

Saad: No, I am sorry, the server is the blog, where the blog is sitting and then you have an aggregator, but what…

Lee: I agree that’s a simpler model than XMPP, but it doesn’t provide kind of like the efficient real-time in which…

Saad: Hang on, I am not saying that is instead of XMPP, I am saying it is instead of having an IRC server type model where you have like a relay server in the middle. I am saying you could have a server that hosts the blog, that server itself has a little XMPP engine on it and it pings all the subscribers when you update your blog. And the subscribers are aggregated.

Lee: So you are talking about like you are going to send me a message and tell me that you updated and I am going to go download your update?

Saad: You could do it that way, or you could actually send the update in the ping.

Lee: Right, so that doesn’t solve the other problem that we were talking about, in fact I want to be able to leave you and not receive your ping any more.

Saad: Then you unsubscribe from your aggregator.

Lee: And you are talking about the aggregator is just a service like Twitter right?

Saad: No, the aggregator is a service like Twirl.

Lee: It is running on my desktop? well I am still receiving it, you are still spamming me, I mean…

Saad: No.

Lee: And you want to see the network traffic, I don’t understand.

Anderson: About the aggregator, Chris, it was more the getpingd service, whatever you call that.

Saad: It is just like Google Reader, you subscribe to a blog or you subscribe to a feed or you subscribe to an XMPP notification or you subscribe to a Web Hook ping. You subscribe to it and then you get network traffic from the originating source. And if you don’t want to get that data anymore, then you unsubscribe and it stops broadcasting to you. I don’t understand where the complication is.

Lee: Yeah, but I don’t trust you to stop broadcasting to me.

Anderson: Well that is why you have an aggregator, that’s why it is not the blog that is going to…

Lee: I don’t understand, then.

Gillmor: Unpack what Bob said, because we’ve had a number of examples in the last couple of weeks for people who do not respect the unsubscribe model.

Saad: I missed all that.

Gillmor: We have a number of examples of people who do not respect the unsubscribe model.

Anderson: OK, but if your aggregator works for you, the subscriber, not for the publisher, then the aggregator can block whatever you want your aggregator to block, right?

Saad: Exactly.

Gillmor: OK, Robert, so go on.

Anderson: So I mean I’d like to go, we are talking about this instead of DNS, but when we talk about DNS I have been thinking about further how email works and now you have message exchanges, right? You have several MX records that say who is in-charge of delivering your messages. And I think this is sort of analogous to that where you say you have to tell the world, this is my aggregator, this is how I get my information and whether that is a Google service or someone else’s service.

Gillmor: That would be my point exactly, which is that at some point there has to be a centralized solution to…

Saad: I am arguing that is a flawed assumption and a flawed analogy.

Gillmor: I know you are arguing it, but you haven’t proven your case and I am hearing from Robert an example of why it is at some point you have to pay the piper, which is that there is going to be some controlling authority, whether or not it is controlling by on the basis of an algorithm, on the basis of a person.

Saad: So who is the controlling authority in the blogging ecosystem?

Gillmor: OK, let’s talk about that, you want to really go down that road.

Saad: Yes.

Lee: Yes.

Gillmor: Right now, Mike Arrington.

Saad: [laughs] I am not talking about who is the most popular, I am talking about who controls the infrastructure of blogging.

Gillmor: I am not talking about popularity, I am just talking about from — the market has to some extent voted Arrington into a position of authority. If there is authority, that is where it goes. [00:45:02]

Saad: We are talking cross purposes, Steve, I am saying who in the infrastructure of blogging that is publishing RSS using WordPress and are consuming RSS using Google Reader or any other product out there, who has got the controlling authority?

Gillmor: Well, what was the ping server that was in the center of this 6-7 seven years ago?

Saad: Weblogs.blog or something.

Gillmor: .com, yes.

Saad: .com, yeah.

Gillmor: That’s right.

Saad: OK. So if you take that piece out of it and moved the pinging to the blog software using again an XMPP engine at the blogging software side, you are mimicking blogging except even taking the centralized pinging server out of it.

Gillmor: OK. Hold that thought. Bob, is that a realistic concept?

Lee: I didn’t quite understand what he was saying to tell you the truth. I was just thinking about something. I think what we already need is already built into out instant messaging servers right, like you can change your status and broadcast your status and I can stalk you.

Gillmor: Yes.

Lee: Or I can make you a friend on the instant messaging server and I receive those status updates. So isn’t it just kind of a matter of my IM client presenting me those status updates in a different way?

Gillmor: Doc Searls, are you still there?

Searls: Yeah.

Gillmor: OK. Is this where Jabber came in?

Searls: I will cop with Mike, I am sort of confused. So when you say this is where Jabber came in, what is the diff?

Gillmor: What he just said, what Bob just said was, you want to repeat that?

Lee: Yeah, everything we need is already on the server side in my Jabber server, like Steve can change his status and I will see that in my IM client if I made him a friend on the Jabber server. It is just a matter of instead of just putting the status next to his name, just give me a list of the statuses as they come in, in an IM window.

Searls: Well, I guess those are obviously features of a Jabber sever, I am not sure how that comes up to all the need for — but then again what need is may be different things to different people.

Gillmor: Right now, I am trying to boil this down to a set of use cases that would satisfy everybody on this call. And right now, the only used case that hasn’t been satisfied by what Chris has been talking about other than mine, which is that it is in no way real-time, is what Bob has been talking about, about notification and the ability to control on a point-to-point basis who can talk to who. Is that an accurate summary, Bob?

Lee: That sounds exactly right.

Saad: I actually like using the status updates, I actually like that idea because you are absolutely right, it exists and it works right now.

Gillmor: And it would also…

Searls: Something different here though about Twitter and that is how the IMs are kind of inverted, right. And right now you can’t just show up and start IMing me.

Lee: Yeah, there was definitely a problem with that because like if I wanted to receive Steve Gillmor’s status updates right now with the existing Jabber server, I would need to have his actual user name and then I would be able to send messages to him as well.

Searls: Right, but he would also have to say that that was OK, right?

Lee: That’s true, yes.

Searls: I mean that’s a whole different model and that’s just the things that is so interesting about the Twitter contract?

Gillmor: What was that?

Searls: The fact that you can follow someone and unfollow them and it is different from subscriptions of RSS.

Gillmor: OK good.

Searls: If we talk about just how this is just like IM, we can just all use Jabber, then we are missing the big interesting use case and…

Saad: I disagree with that idea, why is that different to RSS? Why is subscribing to an RSS feed and then unsubscribing to it different from following and unfollowing?

Canter: Because there is a persistent list of people that you are following.

Searls: Besides that, I think there is a big…

Gillmor: One at a time please.

Searls: The big difference — to answer that — is I think that you can then go ahead and block people. You can’t do that with RSS, not in any reasonable way.

Saad: So you are saying blocking people from getting your updates.

Searls: So, let’s say I am wrong and they are exactly the same, how do you block them?

Gillmor: No, you’re not wrong, because Dave Weiner has blocked me and yet if I go to FriendFeed — which is I believe polling through an RSS infrastructure, and is certainly making it available on RSS — I can read Dave Weiners’ tweaks even though I am blocked. So that’s a fact. That routes around the block mechanism.

Saad: Well, blocking people from getting your updates — we haven’t raised that before. That’s a completely different problem.

Canter: It’s a basic part of the Twitter service.

Saad: I’ve never actually blocked anyone. I don’t know why you would want to block them in terms of… [00:50:02]

Gillmor: We could spend a whole show about this. Trust me, Chris, people block other people. And it pisses off people and it makes people happy. So it’s something that is going to continue.

Saad: You could still block people with…

Gillmor: The whole political infrastructure of the Twitter service — and by that I mean it’s like the election. There is going to be an election. The Electoral College may suck, but it’s going to be how it’s decided.

Right now, Twitter may suck in terms of some of its implementations but it is how it is going to be decided for the conceivable short-term as far as I’m concerned. Because I have no reason whatsoever to leave Twitter. Whatsoever.

Saad: Yeah, but you don’t necessarily have to leave Twitter wholesale. If you use Twirl, for example, Twirl could implement this.

Gillmor: My only motivation, as I have said directly to everybody on these calls as well as to Loek and others is to incentivize Twitter to do the same thing that Loek is going to be doing.

If they provide the same kind of filtering of track that is necessary, if they provide some sort of reasonable — I’ll put it another way. If they do not limit the XMPP access to their services in any way then I will continue to support them. If they were to shut down that capability…

Saad: Why would they?

Gillmor: Then they would be in violation of what I consider to be my user contract, which is where I totally agree with everything that Dave and Mark and everybody else is saying, which is that we are liable to a single point of failure.

Saad: Why would they shut down their XMPP stuff? It actually reduces load on their server because there is less client -

Gillmor: I don’t care why they would. I’m saying if they did, that would be the only way that they could destroy their monopoly, if that is in fact what it is.

Saad: They would never do that.

Gillmor: I don’t think so. I think they are smart people. And I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Saad: It’s not just about being smart. It’s not in their interest in any way shape or form to do that.

Gillmor: Right, because there will be a significant move away from their service to somebody else.

Vizard: Can I ask a question at this point? Is there going to be more finesse in these services at some point, because as you continue to scale up on Twitter and I get to hundreds of people that I am following, I don’t really care about who doesn’t like what allergy pill? And I don’t really care about who is having breakfast.

So I’m trying to figure out if this scales up and you try to manage it, is there going to be some way of finessing, either by keywords or traffic or something?

Gillmor: Yes. That’s exactly why the issue of the real-time gateway and the track mechanism, which is only available through real-time streams, is so fundamental to the system. Without track I would be off, I wouldn’t be using the service.

Saad: But with track you’re talking about tracking keywords that are appearing and people you’re not following. But the question was how could we actually filter the noise and the signal from people we are following? Actually I have been working on that with my guys for a year.

Gillmor: That is an interesting scenario. I don’t spend too much time worrying about that because I don’t follow very many people. I do however track the kinds of conversations in which I think I am going to be interested.

And a filtering capability on top of that track mechanism is exactly what is now being discussed, not only in the community but also by Twitter themselves. And they in fact are working on it. So we have just gotten to the heart of what this issue is about from my perspective. What Mike Vizard just asked is in fact, the fundamental question.

And the answer will be provided by Twitter because if it’s not it will be provided by Twirl and other companies. If they were to block the ability of other companies to be able to produce a simulacrum of the GTalk gateway service that is now existing, they would be run away from in droves.

And there would be a new Twitter that would surface that had the same functionality but without some sort of limitation on the access to the system. So I don’t know why we need anything decentralized at all, other than the ability of us to vote with our feet.

Saad: Yeah, and we can all walk away and go to nowhere. [laughs]

Gillmor: No, no. Nowhere? How long did it take? This is where Dave’s idea is a good one as a transitional device. [00:55:02]

Saad: I don’t think so because I don’t really care about backing up my Twitter stream.

Gillmor: No. You’re not listening. You’re not listening. You’re talking about your idea that you have been doing for a year.

Saad: No, I’m talking about backing up Twitter.

Gillmor: Chris, you’re talking about bootstrapping an RSS backup. So as an incremental stage to absolutely insulate us from any breakdown of this system while we are working out multiple SMPP gateways…

Saad: FriendFeed is already backing up your feed.

Gillmor: Absolutely.

Saad: So who needs to solve the problem of backup when backup is already occurring?

Gillmor: FriendFeed’s UI sucks. It’s also got a lot of noise in the system because it’s got all these conversations that are completely trapped inside of Friend feed.

Saad: But who cares how nice and pretty your backup system looks? If it’s in a single system, you can go and scrape it out at a later date.

Gillmor: Because there is no way that I’m going to re-simulate or re-energize a conversation that is happening in real time after the fact. That’s not going to happen.

Saad: No, we are talking about backup. If you want to backup your tweets then you…

Gillmor: I’m talking about the ability for the system to be bulletproof against a complete collapse of the system today. That is what the value of a backup system is. That and nothing else.

But what I have heard on this call so far that I think is extremely important is what Bob Lee said, which is, “Hey, why don’t we just use the Java server?” That tracks with everything that I understand about what Twirl is about. And in fact it may be what Twitter is up to in terms of fixing the track filter problem. Those solutions orchestrate into improvements and progress.

Gardner: That makes a lot of sense, Steve. I mean, just as a user — this is Dana Gardner — I find that what I do less of when I am twittering is instant messaging.

So there is almost an inverse relationship to the two. But somehow bringing them together, where the backend might be the messaging and the technical guts of the thing are growing more common, but that there are separate ways in which the buddy list and the social graph and the control of blocking and permissioning is separate. It has an overlay. Isn’t that possible?

Gillmor: Do any of the technologists want to weigh in?

Gardner: Let me just jump in with something - I’ve got an instant message, not a twit from a listener. He is a pretty technical guy who says, “Chris says push RSS but allow more spamming. And one of the others of you mentioned that but didn’t clarify it.”

So just a little item there. I’m not qualified to say how that is, but there you go.

Gillmor: OK. Bob Lee, do you have a comment on that?

Lee: No.

Saad: I do.

Lee: I’m still thinking about this whole just kind of adding these features to the Java server itself.

Gillmor: Right. Well I hope you keep thinking about that. Chris, do you want to comment on it?

Saad: Yeah, you don’t get spam over RSS. In your feed really you don’t get spam because you subscribe to people, to sources you care about and you unsubscribe from those who are spamming you. So the same is true. All I’m talking about is adding a ping into the process so that it is more real-time.

Gardner: So Steve, back to your point. I think you were suggesting that there is an opportunity here to mash up on the backend some of the instant messaging infrastructure with what Twitter accomplishes.

That takes off the table perhaps some of the reliability issues we are issuing with Twitter, but we can still maintain and Twitter can maintain the overlay of the sensitive directory function.

Lee: Yeah.

Gillmor: I think that’s an accurate statement. Marc?

Canter: Well again, you don’t subscribe to spam. So if someone starts spamming you, you unsubscribe them.

Gillmor: I agree with what Chris said. To me it still sounds like science fiction, you know, the turning latent RSS into real-time XMPP. I don’t know how that works.

Saad: Steve, I was told that MySpace would never open up their platform and share their day with other providers and I was told that was science fiction six months ago too.

Gillmor: Yeah, and to this day I don’t care, couldn’t care less.

Saad: No, there is a difference between not caring and thinking it is never going to happen, those two are different things.

Gillmor: But you know, what this show is about is the intersection between caring and the technology, not about one as opposed to the other, but about both of them. What I care about is whether it is going to happen during my lifetime or not. [01:00:06]

Gardner: Well what about the aspect of the vendor supports and politics on this notion of commonality between Jabber Instant Messaging and Twitter, for those people that are supporting instant messaging like AOL and Microsoft and Yahoo that might be able to get in on some ways on the Twitter game.

Gillmor: No, I think you are getting more complicated than it really is. I mean we have seen with Chris’s data portability organization, massive take-up on the part of the large vendors. I mean, Chris, you should insert your commercial here, but what is going on with MySpace, what is going on with Yahoo etcetera, etcetera, there has been some real acceleration in terms of people coming to the table, correct?

Saad: Oh the only thing I would take credit for is the acceleration and giving it a narrative.

Gillmor: Yeah, I am not asking you to take credit, I am just asking you to report on it.

Saad: Yeah and I think it is an example of how something that was science fiction six months ago can happen within six months given the right messaging and the right conversation.

Gillmor: Well, I think you are sort of mashing up what I suggest is technology science fiction with political science fiction. We have got a black guy who is about to become president of the United States. That’s political science fiction and that happens all the time.

Saad: No, but I think it is neither technology science fiction nor political science fiction.

Gillmor: OK. And given I hear Bob Lee, I can hear him thinking about Jabber. And what you are talking about, I don’t understand, and I haven’t heard anybody else explain it to me.

Saad: I get that a lot, that’s all right. But I actually do like the idea of taking status messages, status changes as tweets and modifying the Jabber server however needs to be modifying the client, so just place it in the chronological order and then…

Lee: It doesn’t need to be modified at all, I don’t think.

Saad: Well yeah, I don’t know, I am no Jabber expert.

Lee: I guess the status update.

Gillmor: You got to speak up, Bob.

Lee: What did you say?

Gillmor: You have to speak up.

Lee: All right, yeah, I don’t think the server needs to be modified at all. I mean what if we just create it and add-in plugin right now that has one more little tab, where it prints out the status updates as they come in and then I can like type in…

Saad: Let’s do it.

Bob: I can just type into that thin little tab and update my own status really easily.

Gillmor: All right, so I want to go around the table, we are going to wrap this one up early. And, I want to start with Mike Vizard, have you heard any kind of answers to your questions?

Vizard: Well, I am encouraged that people are working on the specification issues in terms of all these feeds because everything right now feels like a pretty blunt instrument and I wind up checking out after a while and then I can’t find the signals from all the noise. So I think there is a lot of technology issues that have to get resolved on that and I am sure that there are more people working on that and the folks in this phone call, but it seems that that is kind of the next iteration of this thing is, how do we add more context to this Twitter-type environment.

Gillmor: Loren Feldman, are you still there?

Feldman: I am here.

Gillmor: Do you have any comments?

Feldman: You know, the first one is people making a big fuss about Twitter data. I don’t even know what the importance of Twitter data is to begin with, to be honest.

Gillmor: Well, it is your career quite a bit.

Feldman: Well, you know that is arguable considering my career but…

[laughter]

Gillmor: All right, it is [...] career.

Feldman: Second off, I think that a lot of this discussion and why this discussion started is frustration with the service, which one of the other gentleman brought up. It is almost two issues. I think a lot of it is frustration with the service going down and that kind of meshes in with everything.

In terms of, again, FriendFeed and Twirl and other guys already backing this stuff up and frighteningly enough to use these, even if you take it out of their hands, it is still ending up in somebody else’s hands. So, at some point the trust factor of who is the less evil or the most open, the bottom-line is, it is still going to be in somebody else’s hands.

Now I understand the point of it having the redundancy of having it in lots of people’s hands and I guess that is one way of making it more palpable and easy to swallow, but the bottom-line is I agree with you Steve that it is never really truly, truly open and in the user’s hands anyway. [01:04:59]

Gillmor: You know, just as a data point, Shawn Fanning just had a $30 million payout. It took him 20 years or whatever, but these kinds of peer-to-peer approaches have a habit of sort of…

Anderson: Are you saying Shawn Fanning had a peer-to-peer approach?

Gillmor: Shawn Fanning was the featured guest of the original O’Reilly Peer-to-Peer conference which became with Emerging Tech conference, which became the Web 2.0. Shawn Fanning became…

Gillmor: What, Doc? Hang on one second. Doc?

Searls: He did Napster, is that right or did he do something else?

Gillmor: Yes.

Searls: OK. Napster was central, I don’t care if he was in peer-to-peer, if it was a P2P conference.

Gillmor: All I am trying to illustrate is that at the end of the road, these solutions that appear to routing around centralization often have a significant centralization component and it is more a matter of wealth to the distribution than it is…

Searls: Steve, it isn’t the centralization component, it is the use of decentralization by somebody who offers a service that is by its own nature central. There is nothing centralized about the web, but if Google wants to offer Gmail, then they can do it, there is nothing centralized that SMTP or POP or IMAP but if Google wants to do Gmail, they can do it, that is so…

Gillmor: Well, that’s what Twitter is doing.

Searls: But that doesn’t make them — the component of the technology is different.

Gillmor: Twitter is offering a service and they can do it.

Searls: Yeah.

Gillmor: And they like it.

Searls: Sure, people like it.

Feldman: Can I ask you a question and a point. AOL AIM: much more vital, much more personal, I think sensitive kind of data and you know obviously tons of zillions of people relying on that and don’t really freak that it is “controlled by AOL,” why are people freaking out about Twitter having central control over what I feel is a less personal thing?

And then if I could just ask a question to the technology guys, why couldn’t an AOL AIM just kind of flick the switch and duplicate the service?

Lee: They can, the only thing that is missing is the track functionality.

Feldman: I mean, again, I am certainly not as…

Lee: A lot of people flipped out about that, at a high level.

Feldman: It seems like the trust issue is already there. I mean, couldn’t an AIM just come in and do this pretty easily?

Lee: Trivially.

Feldman: So that’s what I have always - I have never got, never always been like that’s my office’s bad rap, why can’t AIM just come in and do this, your trust is there, they obviously have the scaling issues taken care of, that’s why I never really understood you know.

Searls: Well Mike Vizard was sort of asking that question in reverse, he was saying why can’t I get my IM buddy list to be on top of my Twitter, which you will want to pick out eight or 10 people I just want to cover closely, but it would be hell of a lot easier for the existing AIM providers to add the Twitter function in the reverse.

Feldman: Right.

Searls: Maybe not, I don’t know, but they seem to be have a commonality, why do we have both of them, let’s get them together.

Feldman: That is what I am saying exactly. I’d love to see it in - I prefer this than a Twirl and another app or something, I’d love to see it in a Skype AIM window.

Gillmor: OK, all right. Marc Canter.

Canter: Well, I was wondering what is the likelihood that Loren Feldman or anybody else would have all their friends on one system. I think that is contrary to the way the world works.

Feldman: I just have a lot less friends than maybe other people and I think that at the end of the day you are dealing with the same core group of friends. I mean I am not a scoreboard, I don’t have nor do I give a shit about 22,000 people.

I do care about 100 and I will follow them. If they suddenly left Twitter, I’d find them and I know they’d find me. You know, I think that is another thing with this is that we worry so much about these big numbers and those are marketing guys who give a shit about those numbers.

Canter: But what about the difference between your business life and your family? It seems to me that there are these natural boundaries in life. If your family is on AIM, everybody else is somewhere else, then you probably need to maintain both. You can’t ask your family to go use some early adopter wacky tool.

Vizard: I guess that would depend on how you feel about your family, right? [laughs]

Anderson: You can have it both ways. They are not mutually exclusive. You can slice and dice these lists, if it is convenient. That’s what we are looking for, is convenience, and the full functionality of Twitter and the full functionality of IM. We want that all. [01:10:05]

Gillmor: And remember we talked about how Facebook is completely irrelevant. Facebook is making some interesting moves, with friend lists, and other ideas, like their IM service, which tie in to their email servers. Powerful as it might be, if they improve each end of that equation, they may have a broker function that might surprise some people.

Anderson: Or to your point, Steve, what’s the prospect of something like Live Mesh pulling this together such that the components…

Gillmor: Exactly. That’s exactly what Live Mesh is, an erector set for the development of these kinds of social identities and ontologies. What Marc Canter is talking about is an open version of that. I think those are completely complementary to each other. Don’t you agree, Marc?

Anderson: If they can execute on that, that’s the ticket.

Canter: Absolutely. But the problem is, and that goes back to the politics. As long as it is Microsoft, there is going to be a whole lot of people who aren’t going to use it. And I won’t use anything from Apple. So there are just certain politics in life that causes there to be more than one system. And as long as there is more than one system, there should be a way to connect them together.

Gillmor: In fact, I am using AIM and iChat, because I am on a Mac, and I am pumping that through GTalk, because it is the easiest way for me to aggregate all these and all the data gets saved to the same chat store, on Gmail.

Anderson: Using their XMPP server.

Gardner: But the openness of Jabber has allowed that political landscape that you are describing — for instant messaging and it’s definitely we need to get for Twittering.

Gillmor: Which is, Doc, what Andre was talking about in the first place, correct?

Searls: Right, and Jeremy Miller, I suppose.

Gardner: Type O on it, you’re all done.

Gillmor: OK. Dana, you have had your last say. Robert Anderson?

Anderson: Yeah, I think that the approaches that have been discussed in this call are pretty interesting. I would like to hear more in the coming days about whether or not Jabber can be really [noise]. Although the anonymous following and blocking capabilities are really key to this.

Gillmor: I think the track filtering is key to not only solving the track stamp problem, which I think is critical to what Mike Vizard was talking about, namely, the threshold above which follows cease to be efficient. And, it is also the doorway to enterprise vertical filters, which will turn what Twitter is today as a alleged consumer app, into the fundamental enterprise app on the network.

Have I left anybody out yet?

Saad: Me.

Gillmor: Who is me?

Saad: Chris.

Gillmor: OK. Oh, you are last. Doc Searls.

Searls: Just a quick word on behalf of the fully distributed peer-to- peer world. I would like something like Twitorrent, and I would like people to think more about how to make that kind of thing happen, and then build business on top of that.

Gillmor: I am with you on that one. Chris Saad?

Saad: I am with you, Doc. I am actually honored to be on the call with him. I think that it is possible to create a distributed system. I think if we think about it almost literally like its namesake, which is micro-blogging. I think if we think about it literally as micro-blogging, we can apply the lessons learned in blogging, which is multiple software vendors providing multiple feeds of data with an aggregator of your choice, with subscribing and blocking and tracking done by the aggregator and/or a Google search type play.

I think that we could actually get all the benefits of Twitter, and in a decentralized way. And, I would give a casual look at getpingd.com, without the “e”. That’s one step towards that, I think.

Gillmor: Bob Lee, last one.

Lee: You know I love Twitter to death, and I have a lot of confidence in my team and everything. This call has been really thought provoking, and I am a lot more confident in the knowledge that if something does happen, I would be able to just pack up my instant messenger and get most of what I get out of Twitter already today.

Some long-term problems we are going to have to solve, if you want to make this a non-simple thing, is the tracking functionality.

Gillmor: Bob, speak a little louder on the last point. [01:15:01]

Lee: The hard thing, the long-term hard problem to solve — in the Jabber servers and stuff and instant messaging servers don’t currently address — is going to be the tracking functionality. It fundamentally necessitates a centralized solution. Even that, or just like a lot of communication between the different instant messaging servers.

Saad: We have already got a tracking solution, by the way. It’s called Google Blog Search.

Gillmor: Oh, the hell you do.

Lee: [laughs] Again, that doesn’t solve the real-time problem.

Gillmor: No.

Saad: To do a blog search, what real-time do you need?

Gillmor: The longer that you fail to recognize the difference between real-time and whatever you are talking about, the longer you won’t be providing a solution that I am looking for.

Lee: Do you use the instant messaging version, or do you use the instant messaging interface?

Saad: Yeah, sure.

Gillmor: You do? OK. Well, can’t you tell the difference?

Saad: I think with the solution that I am proposing, with the real-time layer put on, and the push mechanisms in place, a blog search type solution can become real-time. So I don’t…

Gillmor: I don’t disagree with you, in theory, but who owns that ping server?

Saad: This is a really complicated question that we have been talking about.

Gillmor: I don’t think that’s complicated at all. I think Loren Feldman hit it on the head..

Saad: Sorry?

Gillmor: Somebody is going to own that ping server, even if it is for a couple of hours. And then who is going to take it away from that person and give it to the next person?

Saad: Somebody is going to own a server somewhere at some point. You know, IRC…

Gillmor: Right. That’s all. The question is, just who? And what baggage is attached to it?

Saad: Well, it is distributed, and it is open protocols, and it has a name, and therefore you can vote with your feet at that point, because there will be multiple providers of the same echo.

Gillmor: I am already voting with my feet. I am voting for Twitter. When somebody else takes that same stream and virtualizes it, I will probably vote for Twitter and that service. And when Mesh sucks it in, I will vote for that server: Twitter and that service and Mesh.

Saad: I am with you. I love Twitter right now and I am not calling for the end of it. The question was asked, how do you distribute it across the web more equally, and I am trying to answer it.

Gillmor: Right. I think Bob is summarizing his thoughts now, are moving into bolting it on top of Jabber.

Saad: I think that’s interesting, but you need to publish those status changes to the web though, so you have them permalink addressable.

Gillmor: OK, so you talk to Bob about that, all right? He is crazy, Bob. You have to filter out all of his bullshit about Hillary Clinton, to be able to read it.

Lee: The web part is not the core solution. That’s just like an ancillary thing.

Saad: Well, Robert Scoble will disagree with you on that one. He thinks that the permalink, sort of being able to link that status updates is an active part of that.

Lee: That’s not what I am talking about. I am saying down at the very core, is at the web part. The web part is on top.

Saad: Sure. OK, I agree with you.

Lee: I have a Jabber bot that consumes the status updates, and posts them to the web for publishing.

Saad: Yeah, that’s cool.

Lee: That’s the core part though.

Gillmor: This ping server is owned by me, so I am saying, this is Steve Gillmor, and this has been the Gillmor Gang for Friday the 9th of May, and I very much want to thank everybody who showed up and especially those who didn’t.

[music]

Gillmor: We will see you again Monday, for another Gillmor Gang.

Bye-bye.

[music] [01:19:31]