[Foundation-l] Announce: Brion moving to StatusNet

[Brion Vibber]

On 9/28/09 12:53 PM, Sage Ross wrote:
> As Kat Walsh alluded to on ... Facebook?!?... free/libre real-time
> services are more important than a lot of Wikimedians think (because
> we've spent so long pushing back against "merely" social uses of our
> wikis?).  In the grand scheme of the things we care about, development
> in that area may be a more critical immediate need than continued work
> on MediaWiki.

The social side is quite important here too... social interaction is 
probably one of the key areas we really need to improve on for 
Wikipedia/Wikimedia.

No matter what else we improve technically I think we all are aware that 
there are serious problems with how people interact in our community, 
and that's one of the major stumbling blocks for new users.

> Wikipedia has had enough success that it's bought some time in terms
> of establishing the ability (and right) of people to control and use
> educational material how they want.  There's still a lot to do, but
> the free culture approach is starting to pick up momentum.  For
> so-called social networking services, it's still an uphill battle.

Yep... what I do find encouraging is that many of the big 
social-networking services are picking up on the idea that easy 
interoperability is a win for everyone a lot quicker than, say, the IM 
wars of the 2000s or the email wars of the late 80s/early 90s. (Remember 
when CompuServer and AOL users couldn't email each other? Hah!) But 
that's something that could disappear quickly as long as it's a world 
where there's only a small number of big players...

-- brion