As of late I have been trying out all the microblogging sites that seem to be springing up overnight. I decided a month ago to go ahead and give Identi.ca a try. It is a microblogging service running on open source software called Laconica. While I love the idea of a “CMS” that is openly redistributed to run your own “Identi.ca” (or Twitter if you will), the actual service is not for me with Twitter and Jaiku being much more feature rich and widely used.
I can’t say anything particularly negative about Identi.ca except for the fact that is just isn’t used widely enough. The service is responsive (given its user base is rather small right now), and easy to use. I wish the distributed “CMS” would actually interconnect each server running it could post notices between each other rather than just separating out each new microblogging site to start up its own user base. This would also help avoid the growing pain problems Twitter was having not so long ago.
While I wish Identi.ca and Laconica success, I don’t think they could be as main stream as some of the other heavy weight microblogging services. It will go in the way of Pligg (CMS for running your own Digg like service), as it will be used for sites that want to run their own service for fans, but nothing to take the place of their predecessors.
For those who might have been following me on Identi.ca (all one of you), I will no longer be updating there. You can continue to catch my updates on Jaiku and Twitter.
Update: Thanks to Evan Prodromou of Control Yourself, Inc., I have been corrected on Laconica not having the ability to be interconnected to other sites running the microblogging software. It is actually made to interconnect using the OpenMicroBlogging standard. Even with the interconnectivity, my earlier opinion stands the same.
7 Comments
I don’t think it would matter if identi.ca had the best features and the cutest design in the world, the name is too annoying to me. I would never try the service. Is that shallow?
But it *can* connect with other servers. For example, http://army.twit.tv/ is connected to Identi.ca. We use an open standard called http://openmicroblogging.org/ to make it work.
@MegaNice9 What’s in a name? For which you call a rose, would smell
*sigh* submitted it before I could complete the quote :-/ you got the point though :) Anyways, it just me, everyone has their own preference
BTW one thing I like about identi.ca is that it’s IM service actually works, Twitter’s is down for ages, and I never received any message from jaiku’s bot.
MegaNice9, I think the name “Identi.ca” is better than “Plurk.”
Even, I must have totally missed that. I will make a correction. Thank you. I was looking through the mess of the Laconica track and couldn’t find what I was looking for. I should have tried harder I suppose.
I don’t think The TWiT Army is a good example. I don’t see their public timeline appearing on Identi.ca just as I don’t see Identi’ca’s timeline appearing on TWiT Amry’s. I also would need a separate account on each site. This isn’t exactly the interconnectivity I was talking about, but I suppose that would be left up to each site. And most won’t utilize Laconica in the better of the whole, but rather to start their own (which is actually what TWiT Army is appearing to do from my point of view). But I suppose the ability being there is more the point.
barlas, both Twitter and Identi.ca’s (even Jaiku’s actually) IM service means nothing to me since I don’t use Gtalk/Jabber. I end up using Ping.fm to post to both since that has an AIM bot.
Skunkie, Well, public timeline of one installation may not appear on another, but you can create account on one server and follow any one from any server, and their posts will appear on your page.
Ah, so maybe the whole interconnecting of the servers is just having an account on one particular instance (say Identi.ca) and then being able to follow a user on a different site running the Laconica software (say TWiT Army). Interesting. I like that solution.