B. Mann Consulting

I'm at VinoCamp for the day, a fun wine event I helped organize. This is the first one we've done, and it all sort of came together at the last minute (I think). We're drinking our first set of wines, and listening to our second presentation. There are tech folks in the audience, posting to Twitter (VinoCamp 2008 or vinocamp).

I think there's a good vibe in the room, the weather outside is beautiful, and the UBC Botanical Gardens space is beautifiul.

I'll do some more updates later, and look for pictures on Flickr to add.

Later being the end of the next day :P I'm just in the midst of uploading my Flickr pics, which will be tagged with VinoCamp. Here are some bullet point thoughts still percolating a day and a bit later:

• 10:30am is pretty early in the morning to start drinking wine
• a large portion of folks that were "techie" in some way (50%? not sure...)
• non-techies not quite sure what to make of laptops, iPhones, and interstitial techie comments
• a handful of people Twitter'ing an event gives it a real time feel to the outside world, and a sense of connectedness to the people in the room
• scrumpy is a type of strong British cider; apparently, it's made with raw meat in some recipes (don't ask ...)
• David Sanders talking (and really, demonstrating) about the shape / type of wine glass and how it affects the flavour made a believer out of me and 95% of the rest of the room...I think an event featuring *just* David and his magical set of Riedel glasses would be worth the price of admission
• Bradley Cooper is Bradinator on Twitter, and I was amazed and the amount of back and forth wine chat there is going on around the globe.
• 14 tastings are rather a lot in one day; some how I didn't quite realize how much wine Lori managed to pull off; no, really, I was thinking maybe 8 wines throughout the whole day
• the first time you have an event, you have to "just do it" and hope you can set the tone for follow on events

We'll be gathering together resources from the event (blog posts, pointers on the wiki page, etc. etc.) and putting them in the email. Or at least a link to the wiki to look for all those resources. I'm especially looking forward to feedback from the event. I definitely had fun and would want to do it again, and the tone seemed to be positive ... we'll see what the entire crew had to say.

I fully blame Chris Heuer. I signed up for an Utterz account, after trashing him quite thoroughly over Skype some time back :P

What is Utterz? Well, it's mobile blogging, sort of. The only capability I've taken advantage of so far is the audio. You get a local (yes, even in Canada!) phone number that you can call, hit a few buttons, record whatever you want to say, hit some more and your recording will get posted. It posts (within 10 minutes) to the Utterz site, but can then also be set up to auto post to a number of other different places, like your blog or send out a Twitter notification. And yes, of course there is an RSS feed of your Utterz, so it's easy to pipe into Jaiku as well.

Aside from audio, you can also send pictures, video, and text to a special email address, and it will associate that with any audio Utterz you made in a 10 minute period.

So, you'll notice an Utterz widget in the sidebar top right, and I've also embedded a horizontal widget right in this post. Tonight, sore throat and all, I opened up my delicious bookmarks page and talked about the last 10 bookmarks I made.

Les' comment was too good to languish in the comments. Content management systems and blogs are now clearly at the "easy to self host level". How long will it take to be able to easily do the same thing with a Jabber server?

In the light of ongoing PHP wrangling, PHP is also likely not the best language to be writing that server in.

What I think would be a hot "Twitter killer" (successor?) would be something self-hosted like WordPress or Drupal. I've been idly thinking about this since I first saw the site, so my ears perk up when I see discussion like this :)

I think XMPP would be excellent for communication for node-to-node and user-to-node. The user-to-user case works for a private IM back channel, but even there it might help to have a web-based Jabber client and maybe a custom XMPP server with an archival plugin tapping in.

Another thing I've been wondering is what limitations XMPP might introduce in deployment cost in a cheap PHP hosting world where WordPress, etal thrive? How hard is it to run your own XMPP server, or is it really necessary? (I'm spoiled because I've either always had root on my own dedicated / virtual server, or shared a server that had a Jabber server running.)

Along with XMPP, though, I think a few other federation options might be handy. Optionally CC'ing to an account on Twitter / Jaiku / iStalker / etc itself via the API to keep looped into an existing community - dirty, but handy. Also, polling RSS / Atom / JSON feeds to "pull" updates for a friend subscribed on the self-hosted node who's not in the XMPP loop.

In any case, I think XMPP is an excellent foundation for a network of self-hosted Twitter-esque nodes. I'm just wondering what else needs to be layered on and how.

 Now go over and subscribe to the rest of Les' stuff -- you probably know him as decafbad.

So, both Dave and Robert Scoble raked me over the coals for daring to say that a popular service with lots of users could be done differently. I had some good back and forth comments in Scoble's comment thread, re-posted below.

• I don't plan on building a "Twitter killer" using Jabber
• I don't think Twitter should go away...just that they might want to look at using Jabber directly as their core, which has many open benefits not the least of which is an automatic federation model
• I don't claim that the entire Twitter community could be duplicated: yes, I understand "it's the users, stupid!"...I can still wish for technological improvements

From my comment on Robert's post: 

I’d love to see a Jabber-to-Twitter API that means all the rest of us outside the walls of Twitter could interoperate, peer, and all that good stuff.

Building it around one company, no matter how many users it has, doesn’t seem like a particularly good idea.

Facebook implemented SMS notifications (”just like Twitter”) and has a TON of users. If we had a standard like Jabber in the middle, people could have joe@facebook.com accounts and jane@twitter.com accounts. And it would all just work

A note on Jabber/XMPP: XMPP is an open, IETF standard that has been used to implement a lot of IM-like functionality in the past. It also happens to be a protocol that’s great for passing around any sort of data where real time or publish and subscribe models make sense.

It’s all about the users: so make it so that ALL the users can talk to each other in a real federation model (which works today with Jabber), rather than being locked in Twitter’s trunk.

Robert's response:

Boris: now joining Facebook and Twitter sounds like a great opportunity! Building a bridge between two islands adds value. Trying to replace the islands doesn’t interest me at all. Building a third island that connects the other two? Good too! I guess it’s all in the semantics.

He goes on to say that "Twitter is NOT IM or SMS" and that he uses mainly the web interface. So...I agree. It's *the* area where Twitter has been innovating. A perfect thing to build on top of an open standard and add value.

Also left as a parting word in comments:

To me, XMPP is a real time version of RSS. That's the very shortest description I can make that also highlights the power and potential I think the protocol/standard itself has. 

OK, I finally lost it when I read Dave Winer's post re: Twitter premium:

Jason Calacanis is known for stimulating interesting discussion. Today is no different.  

He says he'd pay $100 a year for a Twitter that was always fast, almost always up, and had some additional features. 

I sent Jason a private email which I'll now repeat here. 

Just FYI, because of their API, you don't really need Ev and Biz to do that for you. A bunch of us could pool resources and set up a server of our own, and peer with Twitter's. If Twitter is down it would just queue up the messages, in the meantime, anyone who was on the premium system would see the messages immediately.  

 Look: forget Twitter. It has a bunch of users, that's about it. How to build twitter:

1. Install Jabber server
2. Install SMS gateway
3. Done

That's about it. And it has a publish and subscribe architecture built in, rather than all these crazy desktop apps that constantly poll the Twitter mothership. That's it. It's simple.

"Peering with Twitter". WTH. Built into the XMPP protocol. It's a standard. Works with lots of other things already. 

My only explanation for the Twitter craze is that North Americans are still enamored of anything that can do the tiniest bit of mobile integration. Yes, Twitter has managed to scale and spend many thousands of dollars paying for SMS gateways. Great! Maybe if they had built a front end on top of Jabber, they would have gotten there faster...

/me shakes head 

Update: Dave links back and explains that the number of users that have adopted Twitter is important. So...yes, I agree, I mean, I help build community sites for a living. So why are we talking about building an ecosystem around a company? Jabber would allow everyone who wants to build a real coral reef...one that doesn't rely on body of a company in the middle.