Some of you may have heard that Twitter was down the week before last. This kicked out all sorts of thinking and discussion that, perhaps, one company shouldn't be a single point of failure.

The other item that has been coming up again and again is a request that the Bootup Entrepreneurial Society run a "social network" of some kind. People really enjoy Launch Party and other events, and have found them a great place to network.

More specifically, running Co-Founder Speed Dating, we set up Crowdvine as a mini social network. What we found is that it was heavily used - lots of people used it to check out the backgrounds of other people and it continued to be used after the fact. People who couldn't make it to the event checked in and contacted people, some of which actually resulted in companies being founded.

My friend James at AdHack introduced me to the concept of Archive vs. Flow:

The web works in two ’states’ (for lack of a better word): flow and archive.

• Flow: all the new content coming onto the web and its parsing, aggregation, recombination, etc. For short, consider this the new stuff. New blog posts. New Twitter tweets. New YouTube videos. Access is by RSS, browsing, email, IM, alerts.
• Archive: all the content that’s no longer new but is still accessible and indexed for retrieval. For short, this is the culmination of not-new stuff. Old stuff organized and accessed by tags, categories, searches and links.

Most folks only get the archive aspect of the web once they’ve used it and managed websites for a number of years. It’s a little counterintuitive and different from all other media types.
Flow is short-term candy to fire people up. Archive is long-term value that ages and improves over time.

Once I started thinking like this - about content and experiences as Archive or Flow (or a combination, of course, if done right), it has permeated my thinking.
More recently, I've been thinking about organizations and their activities using this same model. And how many traditional, broadcast media organizations are all flow. They don't even *think* about archive. And this is epitomized by what I think is the very basis for all web-based Archive concepts: the permalink. If your piece of content, your experience, does not have a permalink, there is precious little I can do with it (including find my way back to it).
Two examples of media organization that are pretty much all flow: TV and radio (especially the news and/or local versions). Neither have permalinks in their "native" format. Their companion websites are slowly evolving some archive functionality, but it's not very good. Even worse, their websites do a bad job of showcasing the inherent flow nature of the organization and the content they serve.
Hulu is an example of a TV-related website that is starting to provide a great archive functionality. More like this, please!
Other TV sites do have some clips after the fact, and ways to link to them, but these are divorced from the native medium. You have to remember to go back to the website, somehow find the piece of content you were watching, and even then you might not have a permalink (think hour long clips, mini clips, or mystery meat javascript navigation that doesn't let you link directly to items).
Radio is the example that I think is:

1. in the most dire need of showcasing the "flow" nature of their content on their companion website and
2. has done a terrible job of doing anything to grow an archive that, as James says, has "long-term value that ages and improves over time".

A counter example is actually CBC Radio - they're growing an archive at a furious rate for most of their shows in the form of podcasts and interactive shows like Spark that blur radio and web and interactivity. But, I think the local "news" radio doesn't do nearly as good a job of moving from flow to archive on the web, arguably where it is the most important. The produced "shows" just happen to currently be broadcast over the air - but they are discrete chunks of content that can probably be better delivered via the web.
Last.FM is an example of a site that is tangentially related to this discussion, at least as regards music. They turn your "flow" of music listening into your own personal archive. And it grows richer over time. Radio doesn't do this for you, even on their own website. You can't favourite a song, or share it, or tell other people to tune in to a particular frequency RIGHT NOW if they want to hear it. It probably should.
So, how do flow-based organizations grow an archive? I think the prime example of native flow tools on the web today are all based on microblogging: Twitter, Friendfeed, and Facebook status messages. By looking at these native flow tools, media organizations can do several things at the same time:

1. Leverage the flow based, real time nature of their content and business - every item from their native medium becomes the basis for a microblog post coming from their own brand.
2. Build interactivity around this web-based flow version. What if your radio or TV station tweeted back at you? What if it used hashtag #traffic? or #news? or #contest?
3. Use all of this activity to automatically create permalinks which can be shared, rated, commented and in general, grow value over time. Since every microblog has a permalink "for free", there's the basis of your archive. Layer on other tools to remix, analyze, mashup, and visualize the depth of your archive over time.

Oh, and you probably shouldn't cede all of this great archive content exclusively to Twitter or any other third party network. Like cross-posting to YouTube, you definitely want to reach the audience on Twitter (and Facebook, and so on), but you first want to post to your "own" microblog. How do you get your microblogging network? I'm glad you asked!
There are a number of tools evolving to support the Open Micro Blogging standard that will let a number of different sites all talk to each other. This means that platforms like Drupal or WordPress can easily support implementations of microblogging.
More simply, Laconi.ca is an open source project designed to be a turnkey microblogging platform. The biggest single example is the Identi.ca site, and a good example of a community using it is Leo Laporte's TWiT Army. Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca / Identi.ca recently shared with me that he's also working on a fully hosted option. Watch status.net to keep up to date with that option.
Much of the growth of the web has come from its Archive nature, rooted in the permalink and being able to instantly get back to a single piece of content. Google and Wikipedia are two prime examples of this. Flow and real time are more recent entrants, but they are making the web grow even faster [1].
How is your flow based organization going to participate in both?

As announced on the Google Code blog / cross-posted to the Jaiku blog, Jaiku is going open source:

As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers. With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we're excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.

The rest of the Google Code announcement actual mentions the end of Dodgeball (also similar to Jaiku and Brightkite) plus the Mashup Editor (which I had never heard of). Technically, the Mashup Editor is also moving to the App Engine infrastructure.

I had heard rumours of the coming open source nature of Jaiku, but didn't think it would extend to Google itself essentially not further developing it. There has been talk of a tightening of focus, which is fine, but I think real time, Jaiku-like services (and really, Jaiku was first ... Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. came later) are going to become more important, not less.

The open sourcing of Jaiku should make one wonder about the recent funding for Identi.ca. I think what the Montreal Startup Fund guys are doing is fantastic, but don't know that I agree with putting money into open source projects before they've shown real traction.

That funding link points to a GigaOm post that also points to Twitter for Enterprise "clones" Yammer and Presently. I like both of those tools, and think they work great for internal / group communicatons. Stowe Boyd's write up of Presently is what made me go try it, plus we had a need for shared / private groups for Bootup Labs.

So, the open sourcing of Jaiku is one thing. The BIG thing is that this allows turn key public / private microblogging on a scalable infrastructure. No fail whale, you just get more resources via the underlying Google App Engine. And by turnkey, I mean anyone with a Google Apps for Domains account can follow a few steps to run their own instance, on their own domain.

Oh right, and by the BIG thing, I mean that this instantly catapults microblogging into a fully federated system: I set up jaiku.bootuplabs.com, which can federate with all the other Jaiku instances on Google App Engine. It's open source, so allowing one to map identities to Twitter, Identi.ca, or other systems is certainly possible as well. Or, as Presently does it, by pre-pending a special tag for posts you want to show up on other systems.

OK, I don't know if that last bit is true, I'm just hoping it is: will federation be turned on out of the box? Or an option? In any case, it's open source, so it would definitely be possible to add this feature.

One final question I have is where the centralized discussion of future features / development / etc. for Jaiku Engine?