At the welcoming party for this year’s GnomeDex, I caught up with the excellent John Hartman who I’ve met before at GnomeDex and in Second Life. He interviewed me for AlphaGeek TV

He wanted to know all about the Twitteromance between Efisia (my now fiancee!) and I

So, I talk about aaaaaall that and then cover a load of things like Second Life blogging and using trees of media to manage podcast networks and build the Web 3.0 concept of ‘Social Multimedia Networking‘ using OPML.

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=8rYOslqQcm0]

Yesterday, Dave Winer says that ‘It’s time to open open Social Networking again‘ – I agree. (Though I will add that I wasn’t aware anything had ‘closed’

At about the same time he posted that, while sat here in a hotel in Cambridge MA, I get a tweet from a buddy who says there’s an impromptu Boston Twitter meetup going to happen in town tonight.

So, my mind starts ticking for a second, and bang!! I buy tweetup.com – hehe
I can already see a global network of communities building around it, ON TOP of the Twitter ‘platform’ – think multi-lingual global cityname subdomains. Aggregate feeds of each, connected by the participants of the communities. boston.tweetup.com, london.tweetup.com, melbourne.tweetup.com etc, etc.

I *know* you get the picture.

All this will need a calendar system of course. Or we’ll all be late / early! ha!

I’ve met so many people via Twitter actually, including (and not many people know this) but my new girlfriend. Yes, I’m falling in love with someone I met on Twitter! ) – on the other side of the planet!!

Let’s turn colliding, fleeting, passing electrons into flesh-pressing real relationships.

This is BIG!!

And, my friends – the planet is SMALL! A LOT smaller than you think.

In response to John M who asks :”I’m totally confused by the animosity here. Like Chris, I can’t see that it makes any material difference whatesoever. What gives kosso?”

You know what? It’s weird I can’t put my finger on it exactly. Why I feel peeved at all this, after recently renewing my account fee. Oh.. hang on!!

It probably has something to do with me not really liking Yahoo’s web stuff that much recently, and particularly all the ads that have appeared over the years. I was a Yahoo! user a looong time ago. I liked it (and them) a lot more back in the day. But this complete and utter blind hunger for ad revenue is kinda screwing my experience a bit.

At least it certainly feels that way.

I CAN see the technical reason why they would want to streamline stuff – in a way. But also I can see programmatically how they could get over or around it.

It’s the fact that I pay flickr for this hosting, in a world where more and more, hosting will be offered for free – IF you don’t mind the ads squirted in here and there.

You are correct though – there is no ‘material’ difference here. But that’s not what they have damaged. They have knocked some of their users’ passion and loyalty.

I love flickr.