TechCrunch Army?


I talked about the Laconica open micro-blogging platform last week and how the real time track nature of distro’s like Identi.ca make the platform so powerful.

On top of that base, the one feature that has fascinated me recently has been the ability to federate communities and have them all communicate with each other.

For instance, popular tech pundit and prolific podcast Leo Laporte has opened up the TWiT Army, and it seems to be incredibly popular among his fans and followers.

The amazing thing is that even though I’m on Identi.ca, I can track keywords and communicate with people on TWiT Army. Think about that for a second. Twitter can’t do that. And 14 years ago, users of CompuServe and Prodigy couldn’t email each other.

Micro-blogging is quickly following the path of email in terms of platform development.

What I’m waiting for is the TechCrunch Community or Chris Pirillo’s band of followers or Kevin Rose and the Diggnation to install a Laconica instance. How about Slashdot or Google Code developers? Mac fans of the world federate?

I think it’s going to happen sooner than later, and when it does it will open a lot of people’s eyes as to how similar micro-blogging has become to those other protocols we take for granted today like POP and IMAP.

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