20 comments

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  MarinaMartin

  11 months ago

  Identi.ca is a bridging service. The kinks are still being worked out, but the point is that you can install your own version on your own server without losing your connections to communities on other instances. I'm already part of multiple networks running the Laconia software and following people in each network pretty seamlessly. (Again, it's not working perfectly, but the service has been out for a month. They're communicating, and therefore I'm willing to be patient.)
  
  A lot of people are heistant to move to Identi.ca because they don't already have 500 friends built-in. This shouldn't hold someone back... once upon a time we all started somewhere, and ramping up on a new service is a lot faster. You've just got to jump.
  
  With Identi.ca, my data is *mine* - this is not the case on any other service, as far as I'm aware. It's open source so if my PHP skills weren't so lousy I could add my own features (luckily I'm surrounded by talented devs who can make the features for me!). I can install my own version and not lose my community. I'm sold.
  
  @marinamartin on Identi.ca
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• 

  dave

  11 months ago

  Okay this is really important, not something to gloss over.
  
  I wasn't aware that they had anything at all working re the federation.
  
  I have a laconi.ca instance running. What mail list or archive do we read to find out how to federate.
  
  Or -- how do I, as a user, follow someone on another instance of laconi.ca?
  
  I am dave on identi.ca.
  
  Let's go, I'm ready now!
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  MarinaMartin

  11 months ago

  Dave, let me get more details for you today. @dacort setup a new instance at grupr.us to play with integrating a stats tab (a la TweetStats) and I am getting messages from his grupr.us account on my identi.ca account. I know there was a delay and some missing messages in the course of setting it up, so as I said originally, there are kinks ... but it's definitely partially working.
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  jessestay

  11 months ago

  What we really need now is transparency via the API - I should be able to make one call, and have it sync all instances running laconi.ca, same with retrieval.
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  jcarreira

  11 months ago

  I'm pretty sure that with Identi.ca your data is the *community's* since they default to a Creative Commons license for everything you put up.
  
  Also, open source doesn't make a bad architecture better.
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• 

  cgerrish

  11 months ago

  The "your name on the micro-blogging network" solution seems to be somewhere in the iNames, XRI, XRDS space -- but there's no reason that Twitter, or Identi.ca for that matter couldn't become an Identity Broker with a microblogging service attached. (or the other way around). iNames curently cost $12 per year, but at scale you could probably charge $5 and still make some money.
  
  The Twitter gang seems to have frozen the growth of their network while they work out infrastructure issues and figure out where they want to hook in the business model. This is the point where the combination of venture capital pressure and a failure of imagination combine to create a huge opportunity for social media competitors. (Identi.ca and others)
  
  I once wrote that it wasn't possible to rebuild New York city somewhere else. But Twitter has stopped doing some of the things that made it the New York City of social media. Its streets are filled with potholes, there are abandoned buildings and broken windows, squeegee guys trying to clean your windshields, trash on the streets, basic services not working and periodic power outages. People won't migrate individually to other services, they'll leave in tribes. And every tribe is connected to many other tribes.
  
  They used to say about the advertising business that all of the firm's assets takes the elevator down to ground level and walks home every evening and – hopefully – returns the next day.
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  shokk

  11 months ago

  Twitter has left a lot of options on the table. I think this mainly due to the distractions of switching from RoR to PHP, and all the server downtime due to the admittedly poor initail architecture. This space evolving quickly but Twitter can still leverage their influence if they move now.
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  dave

  11 months ago

  I totally agree. That's why, if I were in their shoes, I'd look at how I could shrink what I do to as small a problem as possible, one that I could do with excellence and huge leverage (and profitability) and chuck all the marginal opportunites over the fence to startups (that Fred and Bijan can underwrite).
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  xian

  11 months ago

  I think this is exactly right. If Twitter (or Obvious?) could have imagined themselves as a utility, a service, the glue for an open infrastructure, then they could have focused on addressing "as small a problem as possible," as you put it, while still playing a leading role in that (thus far imaginary) open ecosystem.
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  Adrian Bye

  11 months ago

  They probably feel they can own the entire ecosystem due to the strong network effects inherent in twitter.
  
  dave's point about IM back in the 90's points to a profound answer. There are now 5-6 major IM networks (ICQ/AOL/MSN/YAHOO/SKYPE/GMAIL), and I think IM has a stronger network effect than twitter does.
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  Jordan Willms

  11 months ago

  Like many others, we've left and now live on friend feed.
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  Harold Gilchrist

  11 months ago

  I see it simply as, do you want to be website with an API or an Internet protocol. For some reason the folks at Twitter didn't understand how important of a technology they had and that it was much bigger then just a website that you sell to Google. It needed to be an open protocol like dns and http and html before it that you could build the next interaction ... the live web on.
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  PF Anderson

  11 months ago

  I think for this to happen, Twitter has to drastically improved communication, problem tracking, customer support generally.
  
  Last weekend, Twitter deleted my account and several others. By mistake. It took almost a full day and social media campaign to get any response from Twitter. A preliminary fix was in place shortly after, but then there were ongoing problems -- blocked DMs and replies, incomplete timeline, missing followers / following. These were also reported, again with no response. At least, not yet.
  
  http://getsatisfaction.com/twitter/topics/accou...
  
  These problems were NEVER mentioned on the Twitter status page, despite the request of victims and their followers. It was also never posted on the Twitter blog. There was one tweet from @ev saying he'd look into it, but then he went out for wine and wasn't heard from for a day. Not saying that he didn't have other obligations, but rather focusing on the lack of communication. If the problem was delegated to someone else, that would have been nice to know.
  
  Basically, as with previous Twitter tech problems, communication and community support were totally inadequate. Unfortunately, this time, most of the victims were major Twitter evangelists in their own communities. Most of us have work that requires we maintain some sort of Twitter presence, but several of the victims are now relocating their primary communications to other microblogging locations - Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Plurk ...
  
  I am baffled, utterly baffled.
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• 

  Adrian Bye

  11 months ago

  Dave, a truly outstanding post. congratulations
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• 

  cshotton

  11 months ago

  You are too generous. The train left the station without Twitter after about the third serious outage. When they made public the duct tape and baling wire that was their architecture and made no real moves to fix it, and when they took further steps to gimp their APIs and close out third parties, they moved themselves firmly and irrevocably into the "fail" column. Time to move on to the next flash in the pan and hope it burns with a bit brighter management team and a more talented set of engineering skills.
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  James Burgos

  11 months ago

  Hi Dave, I have 3 questions: 1) Are you releasing the software that links your friendfeed posts to your twitter account? 2) If not, are there any alternatives? 3) Where does facebook stand in all this considering they are becoming more friendfeed-like?
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  jcarreira

  11 months ago

  I'm still waiting to hear counter-arguments on why we should want a federated micro-blogging platform. See here first: http://blog.babelnote.com/2008/07/you-think-you...
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  Albert Willis

  11 months ago

  Clearly the Twitter folks didn't know what they created; thanks to hindsight they and we all know now. I suspect they are heads down addressing the architecture issues; once those are resolved, there will likely be new features as well.
  
  Twitter is still the 800 pound gorilla in this space; they still have the opportunity before them that Dave outlined in his post. I suspect we'll be hearing lots from Twitter this fall.
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  Albert Willis

  11 months ago

  Just remembered to mention something: Twitter is way way ahead in terms of its ecosystem of tools and services that are based on Twitter, with more coming all of the time. Just found out you can add trips to Doppler using Twitter, for example. Once the non-geek, non-early adopter crowd gets used to doing something a particular way, it's hard to get them to change.
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  Kevin

  11 months ago

  Completely agree. I've given up on Twitter, I used it to get my phone SMS to Twitter and link that over to Facebook but Twitter IM's been dead since March and I'm sick of the flimsy site that goes down every event.
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