Distributed Microblogging session at Berkman Center, Harvard University June 5, 2008

I'll be doing a session on Distributed Microblogging for this week's Berkman Blog Thursday meeting, June 5, 2008.

Please take note. June 5 is also Harvard Commencement Day. It will be very difficult to find parking in and around Harvard Square. Plan to take the T or find some other means of transport that doesn't require you to park! :)

If someone has the gear to live-cast or record this session, that would be great! Qik.com, or bambuser.com or whatever?


Twitter is a very popular so-called microblogging service. It allows you post short (140 characters max) messages that answer the question "What are you doing?". These messages are broadcast to the other Twitter members that are "following" you, ie. have subscribed to your updates. And likewise, you receive all the messages from all the people you have chosen to follow. One particularly popular feature of Twitter is its ability to send and receives updates from mobile phones, Instant Messenger as well as Twitter's web site and purpose-built UI programs like Twhirl.

But Twitter is also a proprietary "walled garden", albeit open to anyone who wants to sign up. And it's notoriously unreliable. In this talk we'll discuss attempts in the developer community to decentralize and distribute Twitter using an open protocol to address the issues inherent to centralize, walled implementations. I am hoping this will lead to a wider discussion of open distributed systems and ways to preserve the social community benefits of a centralized system.

Official Website: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/contact