Why Micro-blogging and Why Identi.ca?
My family and close friends know that I have been spending a lot of time reading, writing and listening to stories and strategies about Micro-blogging, and in particular, the new Open Source Micro-blogging service Identi.ca. I have also been asked a lot about Micro-blogging or the value of twitter and that is what I want to outline in this post, however instead of twitter, I am going to identify why you should use Identi.ca.
Why should you use a Micro-blogging Service ?
Communication, Communication, Communication.
Micro-blogging is about communication, and we often communicate with many people on a daily basis, and often with many different groups of people. Micro-blogging is another way of electronically communicating with others, and it enables folks to follow subjects of interest, or activities of friends, family and others that we would like to follow.
Think of Micro-blogging as "the email of the early 80's", and I predict that in the future, everyone will have an email address and a micro-blogging address. Micro-blogging is like IM on steroids, but I in my opinion, Micro-blogging is better than IM because the folks that you are communicating with do not have to be present when you send the message, and topics can easily be viewed and discussed by a large number of folks. It's so lightweight and flexible that adoption in the mobile market is simple, which leads to increased adoption by the mobile community.
Twitter Jaiku, and Pownce are three well know Micro-blogging services, but all three are somewhat proprietary and not as open a Identi.ca. Pownce has some real nice features and Twitter has the mass market, however neither can talk directly to each other, however we are moving to period where all Micro-blogging tools will be talking to each other, and that will be very advantageous for us, because it will not matter which service that you use.
Why Identi.ca
I really like Identi.ca for a couple of reasons, it's open source software (by laconi.ca), it is somewhat federated, which means that it can easily exchange data with other open services, there is much more of a technical stream and conversation happening on identi.ca and it feels more dynamic that twitter. I also think that Identi.ca has so much potential, and is leading the way to a more open distributed Micro-blogging universe. Finally, I also really like the distributed model, because it will give organizations the flexibility they need to offer open (in front of the firewall) or closed/protected (behind the firewall) Micro-blogging resources.
Whats Next
However, there are still many challenges to overcome. Standardizing feeds into and out of Identi.ca or laconi.ca instances is one challenge. Tracking and searching across multiple federated sites is another, and of course there is the scalability question, what will happen when Identi.ca has 2 million users.
Many others see these challenges and this past Friday (9/12/08), a group lead by Steve Gilmore of the Gilmore Gang sat down to discuss these issues. The meeting was called the BearHugCamp and I have included links to summaries and a video of the BearHugCamp discussions:
BearHugCamp Links:
Jack Moffitt from metajack.im attended BearHug Camp and wrote a nice outline of the proceedings from his perspective. Cem Basman also pulled together a BearHugCamp outline that includes links to pictures. Leo Laporte from TWIT recorded the event and you can find the video here. And, my impression is that this was a great starting point to make sure that we all understand the rewards and challenges and hopefully this will lead to an opening of all Micro-Blogging services and Social Networking sites.
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