Leo Laporte on open micro-blogging

Radio talk show and podcast host Leo Laporte doesn't think operating systems or network infrastructures should ever be proprietary. He's the host of The Tech Guy radio show, which airs every weekend on stations around the United States, and of FLOSS Weekly, a regular podcast in which Laporte discusses different aspects of the Free, Libre, and Open Source software community. On The Tech Guy show, Laporte answers questions from computer users who call in to get advice and find ways to make their computers run better. Most of his callers are Windows users, but Laporte usually finds a way to mention Linux and other open source software during the course of his show.

Laporte says he has been writing software for decades, and that he has always shared the source code, even before he had a notion of open source. "It was public domain then. But even then, I understood that if you're programming, the most interesting part is to see other people's code and be able to modify it. That's just a natural way to work." His first shot at installing Linux was back in 1994 when he got his hands on a copy of Slackware. "It was murder — but it opened my eyes to the growing open source world."

At the time, Laporte was the host of a cable television show called Tech TV. "We were the first television show to install Linux live." On that show, Laporte hosted some of the biggest names in FLOSS, including Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, during Tech TV's run. "The longer I worked as a computer journalist, the more obvious it became to me that proprietary software is a bad idea. It's not natural to be secretive and it doesn't make sense." Laporte says that especially in the enterprise, the technological infrastructure should be open. "That should never be proprietary. Protocols, standards, and code need to be open."

When it comes to applications, Laporte is a bit more flexible. "If you want to write an app that is closed source, I can see there are reasons why one might want to do that and that's fine with me. But closing the operating system makes no sense, and it is bad for everybody."

Laporte, a Twitter user with over fifty-five thousand followers, recently announced he would no longer use Twitter, but would instead now throw his support behind Laconica, the open source micro-blogging platform on which Identi.ca is built. Laporte spoke extensively about Laconica on FLOSS Weekly last month when he chatted with Evan Prodromou, the original author of Laconica and the person who maintains identi.ca.

"Laconica is identical to Twitter, but it's open, which is huge, and, more than open just in terms of it being open source." Laporte says open standards are just as important in this case, and that the protocols for micro-blogging should become commoditized so that others can build on top of the infrastructure instead of having to start from scratch. Laconica also offers users the option to release all their micro-posts under a Creative Commons attribution license, making the service about as "open as you could hope for," writes Dan Brickley, co-founder of the Friend of a Friend project (FOAF).

With Laconica, different micro-blogging services can communicate with each other since the platform is open, unlike Twitter's service. This makes it possible for different communities to form their own branded services in which users can still search for and follow users in other communities, tying them together in what has become known as a "federation." Right now, Laconica is running on dozens of disparate servers, whose users can all subscribe to each others' updates. Laconica is built using the OpenMicroBlogging specification, which is completely open, free, and independent of any one central maintenance authority, unlike Twitter's proprietary protocol.

Laporte believes that this kind of federation, which could be called distributed micro-blogging, is the key to overcoming scalability issues that have plagued Twitter, resulting in frequent outages for the popular service. "If you can't scale, that's another reason to have a more distributed system. Maybe we shouldn't have two million people on one Twitter. Maybe we should have five thousand people on four hundred 'twitters.' I have three thousand people on my system, and that's just about right."

Laporte's system is called the TWiT Army, [Note that the web site is currently down] named after another of his podcasts known as This Week in Tech, or TWiT. "The conversation [there] has been very cohesive. The conversation is with people you know. With Twitter, it turns into a broadcast medium instead of a conversation. Now, it is a very useful way to get a message out to all those people. But I would love to have all those people all in their own communities, able to search across the federation by keyword, and if I post something of interest they'll find out about it."

Laporte says he is not trying to go "head to head" against Twitter. But he is convinced that Laconica is a better way to do micro-blogging. "One of my problems with Twitter is that I contribute a lot of content and they shut down access to it. I want to be part of an open platform — that's where the innovation is going to occur."

Laporte says that features Twitter previously offered but has shut down, including instant messaging and "track," are two of the most valuable features that Twitter offered. "Comcast realized a huge value from Track," he says. Comcast customer service agents were tracking Twitter posts to monitor complaints or issues posted by users, and then following up directly with those people. "Twitter was saying, 'well it's too demanding,' but the conspiracy theory is that they realize this is where the real value of Twitter is and they want to try to monetize it." With Laconica, Laporte says, these types of features can remain open and accessible, not subject to the whims of proprietary ownership.

Laporte, Prodromou, and others including RSS pioneer Dave Winer, are talking about a collaborative effort to standardize and open the protocols for micro-blogging. The group is planning a conference for all who are interested in the concept of open micro-blogging, called the BearhugCamp. Laporte says, "we would very much like to encourage Twitter to become a part. The idea is to get all the players to the table and encourage them to support the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) (developed by Jabber). We're creating a new messaging medium with emerging open standards, in new and exciting ways. It's not really about Twitter at all – Twitter gave us this idea of micro-blogging, and now we're onto the next thing: let's make it open."