Breaking Down What's Happening on the Social Web

The past few weeks, John McCrea, Joseph Smarr, and I have been shooting a 15 minute video podcast called TheSocialWeb.tv. Each week we try to break down what’s happened in the Social Web in a way that is understandable so you don’t have to be living and breathing this stuff.

This week we discuss Meebo’s announcement of Community Instant Messaging since it continues the trend of making the entire web more social while using existing building blocks to do so. As Joseph explained, the underlying architecture Meebo is using is Jabber/XMPP. What this means is that unlike Facebook’s Chat, social networks using Meebo’s Community IM have the ability to interoperate from day one if they choose to do so. Google’s Friend Connect is another great example of reusing building blocks where they take advantage of OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth. Overtime supporting these underlying technologies becomes easier as companies like Google and Meebo start to build them into their products.

Last week we focused on Gnip and Identi.ca, explaining how Gnip is helping to change the model of accessing data on the web. Traditionally web APIs have been focused on pulling data though things like Twitter’s XMPP Stream and Gnip are starting to flip this model on its head. And next week we’ll be taping from Facebook’s annual developer conference f8 in San Francisco. So please check it out, subscribe to our RSS feed (yes, we know our enclosures are broken), let us know what you think, and how we can do a better job of explaining the Social Web in an understandable way.

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