And so far, support has been good. This may be due to the fact that there aren’t that many customers on it yet, but I was pleasantly surprised to log into the support chat room yesterday (a Saturday) and find one of SliceHost’s developers in the room. He answered my question quickly and with a minimum of questions. How refreshing! I also had occasion to use the support email line, and got a fast answer to a really stupid mistake on my part (duh). You see, I’m a born-again linux newbie. That’s because I’ve been away from unix-style development for literally decades. It’s really fun to be back in it again, and things have come so far in the intervening years! Software like aptitude that can intelligently install *and* uninstall packages right from the command line is great. And it’s so refreshing to work on a system that is, at its base, so simple. Take apache, for instance. All the configuration is right in one text file. No screwing around with dialogs that go 5 levels deep for IIS. It’s all right there. And with PHP, you just plop the files in the right directory and they get executed, no searching for hours for the right dialog option to turn on to get the server to process scripts.

Yes, it’s a lot of fun being back in unix-land again. I think I’m going to like it!!

First of all, let’s call it something more generic. I like Distributed MicroBlogging or DMB. The “Distributed” part is really the key. Unlike a centralized, proprietary walled garden system, DMB would be spread out over hundreds or thousands of different servers over the internet.

Just like email or Jabber, anyone could run a DMB server. People would register on a particular server with their OpenID and create or contribute to microblogs that other people could follow, ala Twitter. Note that people are different than microblogs as entities in the architecture. This is somewhat different than Twitter, in which there are only user accounts. This allows a form of the long-sought groups feature, implemented as microblogs that many people can contribute to.

So, people contribute to microblogs that are followed by other people. When someone updates a microblog, anyone on any server that is following (ie subscribing to) that microblog will get the update in whatever client they have running when the client fetches it. A Twitter-like client will display the posts from many different users interleaved in chronological order. Some clients could maintain a “live” real-time update, where other clients could display only on demand from the user, like the Twitter.com home page.

That’s another important point. The DMB architecture, like Jabber and SMTP, does not specify any particular user interface. How the microblogs are presented is up to a UI designer. The architecture only specifies what data are interchanged, not how it is presented.

So, that’s a very simple explanation of how I see a Distributed MicroBlogging working. There could be large public servers like Google or small private servers for individual companies or groups of people. A server could host hundreds or thousands of microblogs and users, or just one microblog with a single user.
I can envision a given individual’s domain delegating its microblogging functions to a larger server, much as an individual’s home site can delegate its OpenID functions to a large identity service company.

Next, I’ll talk about the single most challenging implementation problem for DMB – notification. How does a DMB server notify other following servers that a change has taken place on one of its microblogs?

Holy Moly! This coming Friday is PodCampNYC 2. I’m doing a session called “OpenID for Newbies” and I have to get cracking on getting the PowerPoint together. Fortunately, I have much of the source material already in the form of an OpenID preso I did at PodCampBoston2 last fall.

I’m really looking forward to this PodCamp because I’ve met so many people online since the first PodCampNYC about a year ago, and I want to meet them in person. In particular, I can’t wait to “virtureal” (meet in person someone one knows only online) my co-podcasters on PushMyFollow, Annie Boccio (@banannie), Christine Cavalier (@purplecar) and Michael Gaines (@istarman), all of whom live in the Jersey, Philly area.

Two more virtureals I’ve been wanting to make for a long time are video editor extraordinaire Bill Cammack (@billcammack) and video podcast goddess Roxanne Darling (@roxannedarling). I’ve gotten to know Bill through mutual friends online. If it works out time-wise, I’d love to meet up with Bill at the beer mecca Burp Castle in the East Village, where I’ve seen him in so many Flickr photos.

I’ve known Roxanne in the online sense for well over a year. Her Beachwalks with Rox is one of the longest running videoblogs/podcasts on the net. I have to say, Beachwalks was one of my inspirations to get into vlogging and social media. We’ve been promising each other for months that one day we’d meet up and I’ve even gotten a proxy-hug from Rox through Laura Fitton (@pistachio), but now it’s finally going to happen! Yay!

I’m also looking forward to renewing in-person friendships with NYC peeps like Kathryn Jones, Jesse Chenard, Grace Piper and Charles Hope that I haven’t seen in a while. A special ex-Boston-now-NYC friend I haven’t seen since her farewell party last November is Julia Roy (@juliaroy).

One technically oriented meetup I want to make is with David Recordon, the young distributed applications guru and OpenID advocate. I have a lot of the same interests in trying to break down the walled gardens of social media and social networking, and David is a leader in that movement.

But yeah, although there is plenty of cool content to consume in the sessions, it’s pretty obvious that the real reason I go to podcamps is for the friendships. I’m thankful that I don’t have to justify the “business value” of going to podcamp to some finance department troll in Corporate America. I’m the CEO of me, and I say it’s worth it.