Free and Open Microblogging

There has been a flurry of activity over the past couple of months in the Twitterverse and I haven’t blogged any of it because, like so many others tweeps, I’m been too busy Twittering.

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform where people post short messages about what they’re doing and often linking to sites on the web. Users post their own messages and subscribe to follow other users messages. When you follow somebody, you receive their messages on Twitter’s homepage, or your phone, or whatever application you’ve set up to use Twitter. It is wildly popular and some people follow thousands of Twitter users. Sometimes it has a low signal to noise ratio, but it’s also a brilliant way to be seen and heard in a community and keep in contact with your tribe.

Now the site has been pretty much generally unreliable for the past couple of months with slow page loads. But the worst thing from my perspective is that their two best features are down. Tracking, and Instant Messaging. Tracking was a feature that let Twitter users track particular words on the Twitter network so they would be received even if sent by somebody you weren’t following. This was very useful for finding out current information about particular topics but, more importantly, it was a great way to find other members of your tribe based on topics they’re tweeting about. So Tracking has been broken, and they’ve taken down Twitter access through IM while they fix it, or so they claim. I’m starting to suspect that Ping.fm and similar services are going to make IM unnecessary for Twitter.

Anyhow, developments this week made the micro-blogging universe very interesting and worth spending some time blogging about. Fellow Canadian and long time wiki guru Evan Prodromou, founder of WikiTravel, Vinismo and other sites big on collaboration and openness, has now launched a free and open micro-blogging service called identi.ca built on a platform called Laconica. It looks a lot like Twitter, but its openness makes it fundamentally different.

For one, the Laconica software is open source so anybody can use it to set up a micro-blogging service or improve the core. The prospect of a proliferation of these twitterish social messaging services raises the specre of many gated communities where people need to convince their friends to join up and to recreate their lists of friends, but this is another place where Laconica is different. It’s the first service to support the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, which allows different services to exchange microblogging messages. You’re on Identi.ca and I’m on Communi.ca? No problem — we can still subscribe to one another’s feeds.

But the most important thing to have in a social network is the community. It’s of limited value unless it has lots of people behind it. And this is where identi.ca has really been incredibly successful. In the last few days since its launch, identi.ca has attracted lots of the keystone people who make Twitter such an important space, and it has gotten positive attention from media and blogs.

Oh, and I almost forgot about url redirection! As if to demonstrate their commitment to open source licensing, Evan’s company, Control Yourself refused to use existing private url alias services like is.gd or TinyURL (or the brand new and very well launched bit.ly) as part of identi.ca service. Instead, they found open source software for lilURL and built a new URL shortening service called ur1.ca.

Free and open? Check. Distributed and federated? Check. Solid community? Check. It looks like identi.ca has it all going for it at this point. Twitter’s continued hobbled state can only help move more people over to a more stable, promising, forward-looking platform.