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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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sorry for the recent lack of updates on this blog folks… just too much workload…

anyway, just stumbled over these interesing Twitter-client usage-stats at Neoformix…in a nutshell: web-usage is dominating much more than I’ve thought it would…

a common saying in web 2.0-land goes: “one never gets tired of twitter-mashups”. ok, I just made that one up. anyway, here are the three most recent twitter-mashups I’ve come across worth mentioning, in ascending order of hotness (according to my bias).

Tweetwheel

Tweetwheel displays bilateral connections between your twitter-followers (or the followers of any twitter-account, since this info is free available as of recently). nothing more to say, except that the mashup seems to have a bug or two (I can’t open my personal wheel no more, which worked yesterday. neither can I refresh it).

Twistori

the brainchild of Thomas Fuchs (script.aculo.us) and Amy How, Twistori is the Google Zeitgeist of the twittersphere. it simply aggregates emotional tweets by keywords like love, hate, wish, feel etc. and displays them in a vertical scrolling way. simple, but somehow awesome.

Twitsay

developed by Max Kossatz, Twitsay is an iteration on Dave Winer’s Twittergram. the usecase: send audio-payloads to your Twitter-stream simply by using your (mobile)phone to call a special number. other than Twittergram - which is available only through a US-line (provided by Blogtalk-Radio, afaik) - Twitsay offers regular lines for austria & germany (soon to be extended to US & UK, as I ‘ve heard from Max).

I always liked Winer’s idea for its simplicity, but never actually tried it for reasons of cost. thx to Max, now I can.

while twitter.com still doesn’t provide search, Tweet Scan does a great job in monitoring the twitt-o-sphere, especially since you can subscribe to search-results via RSS. smart people may use this to monitor their brand/name/service, like Comcast apparently is doing.

• A VC: Biz Stone on Read/Write Talk -
• MySpace: How To Devalue a Platform in Three Easy Steps - SWiK -
• Going Viral like the Common Cold (Not Always a Good Thing) -
• MMOGCHART.COM -
• GigaOM A First-Hand Look at a Chinese Second Life, HiPiHi « -
• Retro MacOS Theme -

• Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities -
• DVD Reviewer - Multi-Region Hacks - Harman/Kardon DVD 27 -
• Facebook News Feed RSS– Nemik’s Blog -
• WordPress: The Complete Post-Install Checklist - Download Squad -
• blog optimization @ Scatterings -
• Wordpress tips and tricks - custom login page » Binary Moon » The home of Ben Gillbanks -

iterating on a little script I wrote few months back (and inspired by a recent server-crash ) I have now put this script public on Twittermon. all you need to start watching your web-servers is an OpenID- & Twitter-account. Twittermon will check your sites every 5 minutes and alarm you via SMS, E-Mail & RSS if a server goes down.

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MoniTwitter iterates on the idea of using Twitter to monitor web-servers. instead using the direct messaging API like my script, I guess MoniTwitter is posting to a particular account which you subscribe to (nothing wrong with that, just don’t forget to switch to private mode!). if for whatever reason you’re not able to use your own customized script, MoniTwitter is a fine alternative.

update: a quick test of MoniTwitter failed, at least I didn’t get any notification after 10 minutes of downtime

the Museum of Modern Betas lists no less than 8 Twitter-clones from Germany alone! in general, the tendency to simply clone webapps & online business-models among european startups seems stronger than ever, steamed up & accelerated by the ever decreasing amount of investment required to put up a webapp…

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