Identi.ca Launches - Distributed Twitter Competitor Is Here?
by Ewan Spence
My old Warrant Officer always used to say (in that low voice of menace) that you should never just state a problem, but state a problem followed promoptly by “here’s what I think we should do.” So if Twitter is Fail-Whaling, then we need another service. Lots of people have said it needs to be de-centralised, that it needs to be replicabla,e it needs to e open-source, using as many standards as possible,
Evan Prodromou has done just that. Welcome to Indenti.ca.And yes that does point to my account there, and not the top, because the site is still in it’s early days, so there’s no direct friend import via your address book (or the Twitter api, heh-he).
That early days is worth pointing out - Identica’s big problem is people may be expecting a full range of Twitter services (heck we expect the full range of Twitter services from Twitter) but I suspect that with an Open Source code base they’re going to get a lot of eyes looking over problems and tweaks - it appears for example Dave Winer is already nudging the code that generates the RSS feeds.
If I was Twitter, I’d hope the big section in their VC pitch addresses an Open Source, Distributed system as a threat, and how they would counter it. If their defence is “we’re the biggest” and “it’s hard to move away from Twitter with your friends” then Identica might be a game changer, if not in the form of the final site, but in the final code-base.
(Cross posted from www.ewanspence.com)
