What is Twitter?
A Micro-Blogging platform that lets you post messages of up to 140 characters in length. You follow people and people follow you. It has been very high profile, is used by a large number of news and tech-news sources. It has an abundance of clients for OS/X, Windows, Linux, iPhone and probably other phone platforms as well. It has an extremely large userbase and is, as far as I know, the first one on the scene.
What is Identi.ca?
Identi.ca is a similar service based on http://laconi.ca/, an open source “equivalent”. It has a smaller userbase and lesser third party applications but way more potential for growth and expansion because it’s open source.
So what’s the difference?
Twitter has been on the scene for a long time now and users are still being drawn to it based on the hype and discussion going around on the Internet. But people aren’t talking about this cool new thing called “micro-blogging”; they’re talking about Twitter, the current king of micro-blogging.
Twitter has a well established, well known presence on the web now, and is commonly discussed. It’s also becoming somewhat of a household name which is the best way to market yourself. Consider other biggies like “Coke” which can also refer to any other cola beverage. Well OK, so Twitter’s not as big as Coke, but you get the drift.
These micro-blogging services allow you to tap into their network and control them or display them from external sources, including Facebook, blogs, RSS feeds, Instant Messenger hook-ups, your iPhone or BlackBerry. I can sign up for an account with Identi.ca that is able to push updates to Twitter so that if I update on identi.ca, my twitter followers don’t miss a trick. They instantly see the update because my identi.ca account has a one-way link from identi.ca to twitter. But what about the other way? I can’t. Twitter doesn’t work like that and they choose not to. It’s fundamentally flawed because I can’t tie it in reverse. I can’t go to Twitter and update and expect my Identi.ca followers to see my update. If Identi.ca implemented something like this they would need to poll the RSS feed from each twitter account constantly just to receive new updates. A nightmare. Also, my friend might have an account called purpleman on twitter and one called terrytips on identi.ca. When I reply to him on identi.ca I am saying “@terrytips ” which also appears on twitter, but doesn’t readdress that to purpleman.
So Twitter have decided to close their doors opening only a few cracks. Nobody can see their platform code and nobody can peer into their data store, which is the opposite of ideas like identi.ca. Is it always the case that an idea will appear on the scene, become “uber-popular” but far too late for any other, better, or more open similar ideas to surface?
If you consider that in Australia, the UK or the USA our supermarkets are very much driven by these giant corporations who dominate over all of the little guys. The big ones made it, they are household names and are ubiquitous throughout society. Nobody has heard of the small guys other than the “locals”. The small ones might be better with their friendlier staff, local knowledge, family values, but ultimately the big guys will win in terms of traffic because that is where everyone is. What’s the point of a social networking site if none, or only a handful of your friends are on it? None. If they’re all elsewhere you might as well be there too. Just as it is when you go out with your friends who mostly decide to go to a pub you don’t like, but majority rules, you don’t want to go elsewhere without your friends, so you suck it up and go to that venue instead. Majority rules here!
MSN, Facebook, Twitter, Internet Explorer, Windows, Microsoft Office, The QWERTY keyboard! And they’re just some geeky ones.
Jabber (an alternative to instant messaging and the technology that drives Google’s GTalk) did the right thing — it built a network standard that was completely open source, allowed an API to other Instant Messenger networks, allowed you to run a complete Jabber server on your own computer, set up an account on it with your own email address and you’d be able to add contacts from any other Jabber server that exists out there in the world. My traffic goes out of my own server and directly to my other contact’s. It doesn’t rely on third parties. It’s that flexible. With Jabber you can do super-cool things, for instance, at your workplace you can run a server internally for internal communication between staff. You can have your server plug into your LDAP tree. You can create a contact like “Alert” who is really a bunch of scripts on a back-end receiving updates from your alerting system. Server breaks and not only are oncall notified but so are all of your tech staff because they receive an instant message.
With MSN messenger you’re stuck with a proprietary and closed protocol, no plugins to other networks and if the central servers go down you’re out of luck. Add to that your messages and conversations are transmitted around the world to those central servers and who knows what happens to them in transit or when they get there. Did you know that the only reason there are alternative messenger clients for MSN is because the protocol was originally reverse engineered? When they change the standard, it still needs to be reverse engineered. Madness? Maybe — but do you have an MSN account? I would guess that the answer is yes and this is because the rest of the world uses it.
Oh with Jabber I could easily set up a Jabber server, my own Jabber account and install an MSN transport — a plugin that was written with code that reverse engineered the MSN Network protocol — I’d be able to use a client of my choosing and it would all appear rather seamless, but it’s just not happening around the world. We should be in a position where these networks (Twitter, MSN and the like!) are all configured in such a way to allow openness and intermessaging. I should be able to have an identi.ca account and subscribe to someone’s Twitter feed or their uber-micro-blog feed and it should all just work. PEOPLE want this, but BUSINESS doesn’t. Will the world ever catch up?
A few links for you:
Twitter: www.twitter.com
Identi.ca: identi.ca
Jabber: www.jabber.org
(Look at that, I even put Twitter first without even thinking.)
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