In my talk at Peers Conference earlier this year I closed with this quote from Brent Simmons:
Micro.blog is not an alternative silo: instead, it’s what you build when you believe that the web itself is the great social network.
I’ve been thinking more about Brent’s post since then, and so for the keynote that Jean and I gave at IndieWeb Summit last week I wanted to start with that quote. Many people have written nice testimonials about Micro.blog, but this one really seems to capture the goal.
It should come as no surprise that I liked Brent’s full post from February about why Micro.blog isn’t like App.net. He made the case even better than I usually do, about how the web is more important than any one platform:
But if you think of the years 1995-2005, you remember when the web was our social network: blogs, comments on blogs, feed readers, and services such as Flickr, Technorati, and BlogBridge to glue things together. Those were great years — but then a few tragedies happened: Google Reader came out, and then, almost worse, it went away. Worse still was the rise of Twitter and Facebook, when we decided it would be okay to give up ownership and let just a couple companies own our communication.
Micro.blog is one of the first platforms to focus on domain names that decouple the timeline from post storage. Anyone can post a Micro.blog-hosted site at their own domain name today and move it all somewhere else tomorrow. It’s a simple, IndieWeb-friendly architecture that we think is essential to the next phase of the web.
