Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

Tonight, let’s talk about surviving Twitter outages - from competitors like Pownce or FriendFeed or Plurk to Summize, tweetscan, clients and any other tricks we’ve got up our collective sleeves. What do you do when a service you rely on isn’t particularly reliable? (topic at Mike Walsh’s suggestion)

Upcoming meetings & events of interest:

• June 28: Grassroots Use of Technology Conference in Lowell
• June 28: Banditos Misteriosos scavenger hunt
• June 29: DevHouse Boston 4
• July 3: PICNIC: Instead of a meeting, let’s gather at 7pm outside the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade (near Charles St. station) to watch the Pops rehearse their 4th of July concert. Bring your picnic blanket, your own meal, and if you like snacks to share.
• July 19 & 20: PodCamp Boston at Harvard Medical School
• August 7: Berkman needs the conference room so let’s plan an excursion.
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

Berkman has an event this afternoon which is ending in a reception in the conference room, so we’re not holding blog group tonight. However, if folks want to show up at Berkman at 7, catch the end of the reception, and then head out to grab dinner & socialize, let’s do that! I’ll be here, and I’ve heard from a couple other folks that they may be as well. We’ll try to update this post to show where we go for food once we leave.

Tonight’s also longtime blog group member Jared Dunn’s last Thursday in town, and I believe he’s planning to join us for dinner, so come bid him farewell as he heads out of town to pursue his LocalProgress project in his hometown in Illinois.

Upcoming meetings & events of interest:

• June 19: Berkman event on employee non-compete agreements & innovation (no blog group)
• June 26: Blog Group: Surviving Twitter Outages: Competitors, clients & other tricks
• June 28: Grassroots Use of Technology Conference in Lowell
• June 28: Banditos Misteriosos scavenger hunt
• June 29: DevHouse Boston 4
• July 19 & 20: PodCamp Boston at Harvard Medical School
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

There’s a new iphone coming up, but does it meet your needs? What about blackberries, N95s, Flip cameras, and all the other nifty gadgets folks are using to participate in social media? What do you use, what do you want, and why? What advice do you have for others considering the same tools? Are we all just too darn gadget-obsessed anyway?

Upcoming meetings & events of interest:

• June 18: Blown to Bits book launch
• June 19: Berkman event on employee non-compete agreements & innovation (no blog group)
• June 26: Blog Group: Surviving Twitter Outages: Competitors, clients & other tricks
• June 28: Grassroots Use of Technology Conference in Lowell
• June 28: Banditos Misteriosos scavenger hunt
• June 29: DevHouse Boston 4
• July 19 & 20: PodCamp Boston at Harvard Medical School
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.

Joe Cascio leads us in a discussion of distributed microblogging:

Twitter is a very popular so-called microblogging service. It allows you post short (140 characters max) messages that answer the question “What are you doing?”. These messages are broadcast to the other Twitter members that are “following” you, ie. have subscribed to your updates. And likewise, you receive all the messages from all the people you have chosen to follow. One particularly popular feature of Twitter is its ability to send and receives updates from mobile phones, Instant Messenger as well as Twitter’s web site and purpose-built UI programs like Twhirl.

But Twitter is also a proprietary “walled garden”, albeit open to anyone who wants to sign up. And it’s notoriously unreliable. In this talk we’ll discuss attempts in the developer community to decentralize and distribute Twitter using an open protocol to address the issues inherent to centralize, walled implementations. I am hoping this will lead to a wider discussion of open distributed systems and ways to preserve the social community benefits of a centralized system.

Afterward, go to a prom-themed contradance so you have something unusual to blog.

Upcoming meetings & events of interest:

• June 7-8: OLPC grassroots unconference
• June 29: DevHouse Boston 4
• July 19 & 20: PodCamp at Harvard Medical School
• See the Berkman Calendar for other upcoming Berkman stuff.
• Feel free to publicize related events here! Let Erica or j know, comment, or add them yourself if you have an editor account.