identi.ca poised to overtake Twitter, or fragment microblogging?

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 01:55:00 -0700

Virtually every single A-list technology blog has dissected the frequent outages and feature removals of microblogging platform Twitter over the past few months. Calls have been made for a replacement, and many have suggested an open source distributed system.

Now such a service is here, and its called identi.ca. The "Twitter killer," as many are touting it, launched today with a big splash on ReadWriteWeb, with heaping praise for the developers.

But the praise is misplaced.

As others have noted, identi.ca is, at its core, a re-invention of the wheel, with the wheel being IRC. We've seen the distributed platform before, and the majority of people have abandoned it for centralized services -- and for good reason. At best, the distributed platform of IRC is kludgy, and at worst, is very annoying.

The first hyped feature of identi.ca is the elimination of a single point of failure. If one server goes down, there are other servers that are still up. All a user has to do is switch servers. But, as any IRC user knows, you still have to go hunt that server down and log in. In other words, it's not a seamless rollover.

The second feature of the new system: It's open source, and not just any open source -- it's the GNU AGPL license, which requires that the code be available to any user and freely distributed. This is great news in terms of scaling, but not so great when it comes to adding features. There is a very good reason that IRC has remained so bare-bones in the feature department; adding any new feature means that every server has to update accordingly. Unless a push is built-in, some server admins may not update, leaving features unavailable depending on which server you've logged into. With the constant innovation in web apps and user demand for a more feature-rich experience, that's an uphill battle for a distributed system.

The third feature? All content submitted is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License. Without users or site owners owning the copyright, there can be no reasonable expectation of privacy, nor of your conversation not being spread far and wide in various forms.

Most users ceased using IRC because it was too complicated, and involved too much latency going across different servers. I haven't seen the code yet, but wonder how profiles will be assigned across servers. Jabber uses a username/server combination so there can be a Cyndy on GTalk and a Cyndy on Twitter. In a public timeline, that's going to get a little complicated and cut into the 140 characters if sending a direct message.

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