My name is Jevon MacDonald. I write about the impact of Social Business Design.
I started hanging out on Identi.ca a few weeks ago. When they decided to go a little more public today I blogged about it at startupnorth. It is easy to miss the point here, this isn’t about being a twitter clone, and it isn’t about jumping to the flavor of the week.
Do I think the experience on Identi.ca is better than twitter right now? No. Do I think there are better features on Identi.ca? No. Do I think we need a better twitter? No
What we need is for Microblogging to shift from being a closed world owned by one company to an open, standards based medium that does not risk dying if a single entity dies, either technically or financially. In the same way that Blogging no longer means having a blog on blogger.com, but instead you can have a blog anywhere and still be part of an ecosystem based on standards, conventions and a scalable model.
Timothy Sykes 9:39 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
Yes! and of course the shared hosting so everyone helps carry the load
Nikos Anagnostou 9:42 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
Too true.
Mark Benson 9:50 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
So, effectively, what you are looking for is someone to do a WordPress with the mircoblog idea? Release the software for everyone rather than running it as a closed service? Sounds good to me.
Kristofer Layon 9:55 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
This is a great idea in theory, though it has yet to be achieved anywhere else.
Blogging is very different from microblogging. Twitter works the way it does because it has built-in follower functionality, unlike regular blogs. It’s hard to imagine how you could follow people in other networks; it would require them to work together in a way that no current social networks do.
And I’m not aware of any emerging, open blogging standards, that has changed the face of regular blogging. Sure, there are now more blogging platforms…but they don’t work together in any concerted way.
Amyloo 10:06 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
“What we need is for Microblogging to shift from being a closed world owned by one company to an open, standards based medium that does not risk dying if a single entity dies”
Yeah… I think a lot of people are torn about that.
I’m not an Objectivist or anything, really — I loathe as much as I love about Atlas Shrugged, but whenever I see this viewpoint voiced I think “Why should Hank Rearden be the only one to profit from Rearden Metal?”
Robert Merrill 10:22 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
This sounds great on the surface, like how IRC is distributed and fail-safe, but that introduces its own host of problems:
a)How do you know your slice of the ecosystem is complete/secure?
b) Where/how will identity management be owned/distributed/secured?
C)Like a public park, if everyone *can* do something (like build rich functionality on top of the base framework), but noone *has* to do anything (because its all shared and intermediated), who will be imcented to do *something*?
Dimitris 10:39 am on July 7, 2008 Permalink
To me this translates that it’s important for laconica to be developed-in terms of features and standards-rather than its identica manifestation. In chat terms this means building a good IRC protocol rather than a good IRC client (eg mIRC).