Remember Zephyr? Microblogging Is Not New

October 25, 2008

Back when Monty and I shared an office and worked on Xiph projects, he introduced me to the messaging system Zephyr.

Few people use Zephyr, but it is very similar to microblogging. Messages were sent to channels which everyone received, unless blocked, or to individuals. In the microblogging world these channels are basically tags.

At one point, Monty connected me to the Zephyr network, and I remember the clients being very ugly, but quite well done. They didn’t support track, but you could fine tune which channels you received and blocked to create a stream with a high signal to noise ratio.

I think those of us very interesting in IM integration of microblogging and track functionality could learn a lot by investigating the Zephyr clients.

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