Spring Blog

Let’s hope that facebook has a better track record with friendfeed than yahoo did with delicious, which has stagnated since the yahoo acquisition. I still have and use my springnet delicious account and I’m not bailing out of my springnet account on friendfeed just yet.

The best take on this whole facebook/friendfeed facefeed/friendbook dialog comes from Mark “Rizzn” Hopkins who postulates that wordpress could be the natural successor to friendfeed, twitter, and facebook. Mark says “we’re headed towards a Federated real-time web, and Wordpress looks like it could be best positioned to take the helm of that ship.” Personally, I like my wordpress blog being the center of my solar system and having twitter, facebook, and friendfeed in orbit around it.

Rizzn goes on to say “I’m tired of constantly re-entering all of my information and accounts into services I start to care about, evangelize for, and enjoy only to have them radically changed either by cultural shifts, sales, closures or policy changes. I’ve gone from network to network over the last half a decade or so, and with increasing frequency, I’ve left not because I’ve outgrown a service, but because it’s left me in the dust.”

Rizzn thinks federation is inevitable, and he sees two paths to getting there: third party clients or wordpress. Here’s the case he makes for Wordpress MU (multi-user) becoming (notice, I didn’t say “being”) the solution to the federation issue:

” * Federated activity streams are on the product roadmap for Buddypress. This is huge, because BP allows all WPMU users (and soon to be all WP users) to set up their own niche social network around their blogging community.
* Wordpress has a number of great themes built for real time interaction. We use one of them here at SiliconANGLE for our editorial backchannel (/sabackchan).
* Data can already be easily imported and exported a number of ways with Wordpress.

These paths may converge as soon as six months down the road, or perhaps as much as a couple of years.

Wordpress, though, has been around and proven stable as a platform through it’s widespread and decentralized support. It could be those very same attributes that have given it success as a CMS that end up winning it the keys to the real-time kingdom.”

I’m somewhat heartened by all of this because I began going down the wordpress mu / buddypress and the P2 theme path six months ago on http://blogs.austinlifestyles.com and several other sites. I’m going to spend some time today seeing if their are updates for buddypress / wordpress mu and begin the migration of the 50 or so wordpress blogs I run to this platform. I hope Rizzn is right because I’m placing a heavy bet on this platform.

In the meantime, leave it to Hitler to sum it up in this youtube video:

Tags: backchannel, buddypress, facebook, facefeed, federated, friendbook, friendfeed, hitler, p2, plurk, rizzn, sabackchan, siliconangle, wordpress mu

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 7:38 am and is filed under video, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.