Ladies and Gentlemen....The Future of Microblogging

The TWiT Netcast Network with Leo Laporte Listen to this after you read my amazing blog post fooooooools!

Jaiku! Pownce! Plurk! Twitter! (Who comes up with these names?) If I am tweeting and you are plurking I can't hear you! When I Jaiku, don't Pownce, got it? Good! The subject of this blog is that microblogging platforms are incompatable. The future looks bright for creating new and improved ways of telling you that I just fried an egg, and learning that you just got new summer highlights. In fact, if we look at the history of the microblogging universe, we will see that it is about to mirror what happened with email. Email started out requiring people to belong to the same service in order to communicate, and next thing you know there is a movie made about finding love over email and you have 50 thousand emails in your inbox these days! AOL may have found competition from Gmail, Yahoo, Comcast, and a billion smaller providers when it came to electronic mail, but the instant messaging never became codified and still to this day, instant messages are fragmented and service specific. Providers like Pidgin will work across multiple types of protocols, but I know more people who use carrier pidgins, than the real networking service. So who is working to make microblogs work across platforms? Ping and Friendfeed let people post to multiple microblogs at once, and as a lot of people found out when Facebook had one of their infamous outages, identi.ca came in to save the day. Identi.ca comes from some guy named Evan who spearheaded a new open source application called Laconica which is in its infancy and calls its approach "federated" meaning that when I tweet, eventually you can Plurk back. This is clearly a consumer driven advancement, but it will also have a profound effect on businesses that use social networking sites to target consumers.