Today is day one for WordpressRetreat.com and this is post one. We’re going to organize a continuing series of Wordpress Retreats in Austin and other cities soon, but we’re going to lead off with something different. Soon enough, we’ll be back with news of the Wordpress Retreats and an announcement of our first one.
My friend and video syndicater Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins wrote the most stimulating and interesting piece of conjecture about Wordpress that I have read this month, it’s called “Could Wordpress be the natural successor to twitter, friendfeed, 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.”
This conjecture by Rizzn came during the week of friendfeed facebook acquisition frenzy. The feeling is that now our warm and cuddly Friendfeed will get kicked around by the campus bully Facebook and that we might get left in the dust. This sort of happened with del.icio.us when yahoo.com took over, except they just got neglected instead of being bullied around. Rizzn talks about his many departures and returns to and from social social network services like MySpace (for Facebook), Twitter (for Friendfeed), etc and he concludes that we need a “federated realtime web”.
Lauren Roth, who has recently emerged as the leader of Austin’s drupal community, expressed a similar thought to me the other night over beers at Little Woodrows. She says the Semantic Web (a concept being pioneered by Austin and University of Texas professor Juan Sequeda) has the promise of fulfilling this role. Semantic Web is something barely understood but is gaining popularity. Lauren would probably make a case for Drupal becoming our social universe hub (except that it probably too complicated for the masses).
But that’s another blog post we’ll explore further down the line, perhaps a video interview or guest post with Lauren, for now let’s get back on track with Rizzn’s fascinating conjecture about federated activity streams. He says it’s bound to happen, given the past uncertainties around communities like Facebook and Twitter. He sees two potential paths toward federation that are imminent given the social media climate.
The first path Rizzn sees is the third party client, apps like Tweetdeck, Tweetie (iphone), Seesmic Desktop, Thwirl, etc. If you want a full rundown see Pete Cashmore’s Mashable rundown of the top 10 twitter clients. Rizzn and Cashmore both site the stat that only 27% of twitter users go to the twitter website directly for their updates and tweets, the overwhelming majority go to third party clients. Rizzn says these third parties could all meet in a smoke filled room and decide to “mirror everything that takes place on twitter to a federated platform – in essence deprecating Twitter and Facebook in one fell swoop.”
Then Rizzn’ makes the case for Wordpress as the second path, and his argument is fairly compelling. He says the current crop of lifestreaming platforms like Posterous (I could name a dozen more and will in a future post), are subject to the same possible fate as Twitter and Friendfeed, they could suddenly transform in to something else less desirable or altogether disappear (remember Leah Culver’s Pownce?).
Wordpress, on the other hand, is so ubiquitous and is adding so many great themes and plugins for lifestreaming that it stands as a clear choice if you want your own stable federated platform that is only bound to grow and become more robust. Rizzn’ is using Wordpress MU (which is part of this website also) with Buddypress to set up his own social network around his blogging community at SiliconANGLE, which I joined about two weeks ago. I’ve found the platform they’re developing there to be very compelling, and I’ll be following their lead on this blog and website, and, through this blog and website and Wordpress Retreats, helping others build a social networking, federated, platform on their own blogs and websites.
On this blog, we’ll be exploring this whole topic in detail with podcasts and video interviews, guest articles, and tutorials. And we hope to meet up with you in the Austin area and other cities at our day and two day long retreats.
Bottom line, I agree with Rizzn’ that Wordpress (not Drupal, Identi.ca, or the third party twitter clients) is the place to set up as the center of your social universe. And we’ll be exploring this whole topic in excruciating depth here at the DrupalRetreat blog and at our real world retreats.