nonsmokingarea.com

don’t get me wrong, it’s great that twhirl added support for identi.ca in their latest release pushed out tonight. at least it will make me use identi.ca more often. however twhirl missed an important point. which is: identi.ca ain’t a Twitter-clone, it’s a distributed Twitter-clone! so it just doesn’t make sense you can’t add any other laconica-servers than identi.ca to the twhirl client (I’ve made this amateurish mockup below, to make my point ). but still, kudos to Marco Kaiser & seesmic, I’m pretty sure this will get ironed out rather soon…

update: having identi.ca in twhirl for few hours makes it so clear, that this should be an open, interoperable service…after a while you just forget weither you’re using Twitter or identi.ca…

the net is buzzing on identi.ca, a twitter-esque microblogging-service launched by Evan Prodromou a few days ago. as of today, identi.ca lacks many key-features Twitter has (SMS-gateway, API) or used to have (track). but criticizing identi.ca’s need to catch up is missing the point, as it’s not competing with Twitter on the level of features (yet), but rather on the underlying principles of message-transportation: identi.ca is based on laconi.ca, an opensource implementation of the OpenMicroBlogging-spec, which basically means - everbody can install his very own instance of laconi.ca/identi.ca on their own servers! the OpenMicroBlogging-spec is the glue that sticks those independent instances of laconi.ca together, enabling subscriptions (aka following) & postings across various systems. in a nutshull, a distributed network of laconi.ca’s promises independence from the fail-whale…

how does this work out for the user? lets assume you’re using microblogging-platform A and want to follow someone at platform B. you find that someone’s profile on platform B and click “subscribe”. remember, you have no account on B, so you’re now asked to enter your user-ID from platform A, which contains the URL of A plus your username, something like http://platform-a.com/username.

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