The Pulse

by Peter Saint-Andre

2007-05-09

Britt Selvitelle and I had a good chat just now about Twitter, Jabber, personal eventing, and the concept of lifestreams. Both Twitterers and Jabberites share a vision of making the Internet a more dynamic, alive, pulsating kind of place, focused less on pages and more on people and their endlessly fascinating activities. Services like Twitter and Jaiku have their finger on the pulse of what people are doing -- a kind of collective unconscious. So in their own specialized ways do services like last.fm and Pandora for music, Joost and presumably YouTube for video, Plazes for location, and much more. I see the need for two things to bring these many streams together into a mighty, pulsing river of real-time interaction:

  1. Common data formats and transports to represent and share all this information.
  2. A forum for builders of such services to collaborate about how to make this happen.

Hint: I think the Jabber/XMPP community has a great deal to add to this conversation because it's the people in your buddy list who care about what you're doing, presence information provides a way to know where the information needs to go, and if every Jabber ID is a real-time eventing service then we have a way to funnel all this data through your online identity off to the people in your buddy list.

Oh and BTW my Twitter and Jaiku feeds are here and here.


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