Identi.ca, Twitter, and posting between the two
It’s now the trendy thing to write an essay about why Twitter is doomed, or why it’s not doomed and all its competitors are doomed instead. And god knows I wouldn’t want to break the back of that trend.
I’ve been playing with Identi.ca, a Twitter clone written in PHP. Lots of Twitter people are becoming frustrated with seeing the famous Fail Whale on Twitter’s “we are currently down” page, and people are starting to look elsewhere. There are lots (and lots and lots) of alterni-Twitters (which is a problem I’ll come back to in a moment), but identi.ca is attracting one of the communities I operate in, open source people. This is because identi.ca is entirely open source: the codebase is called Laconica. This is a nice idea.
First things first, though: I don’t want to update two places at once. Identica* doesn’t have an API (yet), but I wanted to post things to Twitter and have them appear on Identica too. So, I present the Twitter Identi.ca Reflector. Download as a tarball or check it out from Subversion or browse the source. The README tells you how to set it up. It uses Jabber to post to Identica, which isn’t ideal, but (as mentioned) there’s no API. So now you can send Twitter posts to Identi.ca, which is helpful.
Now, why Twitter is good, why Identi.ca is good, and why everything else isn’t. If you just wanted to post Twitter comments to Identi.ca then you can stop reading now.
Twitter looks like it ought to be easy to clone, and it isn’t. This is why there are lots of Twitter clones, and why none of them have taken off. The basic principle of microblogging is indeed an easy one, I agree. But all the other Twitter-alikes are missing something. They don’t have SMS sending, or SMS following, or they don’t have an API, or they don’t have lots of desktop clients, or they have one desktop client that doesn’t run on everyone’s machine, or they don’t do IM. What makes Twitter good is two things: the first is that you can get at it in so many ways. And because there are so many ways, people can build lots of things on top of it. For example, if you want to do the reverse of what the above reflector does (post your messages to Identi.ca and have them show up on Twitter) then you don’t need an extra program, because it already exists: Twitterfeed. Simply sign up at Twitterfeed, and use it to send posts from your Identica feed to Twitter, and it’s all done. That’s the power of having an expressive and complete set of APIs. It can’t be underestimated.
The second reason Twitter is good is that everyone’s already there. They got first-mover advantage. There’s no point going to an alternative because none of your friends are there. This is also the reason that Twitter has fifty desktop clients and that things like Twitterfeed exist; it’s worth the investment. It does mean that if people leave Twitter they’ll all leave together and the bottom drops out of their market, but that’s the way the internet cookie crumbles. Photo sharing sites have the same issue — it’s difficult to build a Flickr competitor because everyone’s already at Flickr, so none of the “social” stuff happens elsewhere because you never hit a critical mass of people.
So, what’s good about Identi.ca then? Well, for me, the big things are open-sourceness and federation. The underlying codebase being open source is a huge win, from my perspective. It means people other than the Identi.ca team can work on adding new features, it means that we can see what’s going on, and it means that there are more open source programs in the world. I like this. Other people may not, but what the hell.
The other advantage is federation. This is all about the OpenMicroBlogging specification; it basically blows away the “all my friends are at Twitter so I must be too” point. It means that you can subscribe on one microblogging service to people on other microblogging services. I could be at Identi.ca, you could be at Twitter, someone else could be at Jaiku or Pownce or wherever else, and we all read one another’s messages, happy as Larry. It levels the playing field. I can subscribe Identi.ca to Twitter without problems. This is a great idea which is rather hampered by the fact that basically no-one has implemented it yet. It’s in Laconica, though, so Identica has it. It helps get around the scaling problems that Twitter are having, too: you don’t need one centralised Twitter service any more. There can be lots of little islands, all of which talk to one another. No more scaling problems. No more Fail Whale. People who need the extras that Twitter provides can use Twitter quite happily (as I’m doing; I like SMS!), people who don’t need that but do need other services can use something else that provides those other services.
The basic concept of microblogging has been commoditised thanks to OpenMicroBlogging — it’s become a simple thing to implement anywhere. Microblogging services can now compete on which extras they offer.
That’s why I like Identi.ca. Oh, and they let you create your account with OpenID, which I did. It’s a win all round. Development’s going on at a fast pace on the Laconica codebase, so expect to see more and more appear over there. Blizzard’s already added identi.ca support to Whoisi, so things are moving quickly. I don’t know whether the trickle of Twitterites in Identi.ca’s direction will continue, but thanks to the reflector code above, I’m now on Identi.ca without putting in any extra effort. That’s identi.ca/sil for those of you who want to track it.
[...] it’s all the [...]
110 minutes later
Surely moving to another single-point service is missing the point?
5 hours later
Phil: that’s what the OpenMicroBlogging stuff is about. If Twitter and Jaiku and Plurk and everyone else implemented that then there would be no single-point services. Until they do, it’s *all* single-point.
5 hours later
[...] has been a lot of discussion lately about micro blogging and the many problems associated with twitter. Something [...]
5 hours later
Ah yes, “This is a great idea which is rather hampered by the fact that basically no-one has implemented it yet.” ;)
6 hours later
Phil: yep. It’s like being the first dude with a telephone. But _someone_ has to be the first dide with a telephone, which is why I’m at identi.ca :)
6 hours later
I don’t quite get why they don’t use xmpp.
server-2-server : check
pub-sub : check
encryption : check
opensource : check
internet standard : check
huge client base : check
now. someone enlighten me please.
13 hours later
Alex - I agree, federated XMPP pubsub is a “better” solution, but let’s face it, any old schmo with web hosting can run a PHP app, whereas far fewer people have the opportunity to run an XMPP server. This is important.
23 hours later
Any old schmoo with webhosting won’t have a traffic limitation (processor time) that’s interesting for a microblogging infrastructure though. The people having their own server are far more interesting - and they should be able to setup a xmpp server.
29 hours later
They might be more interesting, but surely that’s not the point? As far as I can see it, laconica is a way out of being locked into a single microblogging service ever again, not a way to be locked into a smaller service on the server of someone you might know. If you’re only federating with your contacts then your requirements scale up with the size of your personal network, which seems reasonable to me, and should happily deal with a grouping of around Dunbar-proportions.
I certainly won’t be signing up on identi.ca, although in a few months’ time (when federation works as advertised) I will probably set up my own laconica install. I’m not daft enough to move off twitter just for lock-in somewhere else.
37 hours later
You don’t have to use Jabber to post to identi.ca! You could do this using a very simple python script.
An example can be found here http://pastebin.com/f78360ff8
5 days later
saperduper: does this “simple” Python script handle OpenID, which is how I log into identi.ca? Using documented APIs rather than screen-scraping is the way to do it…
5 days later
[...] OAuth isn’t the answer here. My use-case for this is, say, a little script that allows me to post to Identi.ca. OAuth requires me (the “Consumer”) to request a “Consumer Secret” and a [...]
5 days later
[...] have thus far failed to get Aq’s reflector working so find me on which ever suits you most and take your chances. I am really interested to [...]
3 weeks later
[...] http://yennygirl.com/?p=2012 - bookmarked by 6 members originally found by vraius on 2008-08-05 Comment on Identi.ca, Twitter, and posting between the two by alex http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2008/07/03/identica-twitter-and-posting-between-the-two - bookmarked [...]
7 weeks later