2008-07-03 03:27
I’ve been an occasional Twitter user since I discovered it nearly two years ago, but it’s not something I use on a daily basis yet. That said, I’ve been following its service level woes with interest as more and more users hop on board and the company struggles to overcome their service’s initial architecture. There is no question that Twitter has a lot of compelling uses and unlimited potential, but the the lack of reliability and regular downtime has become a significant issue.
While there are other competing closed services out there like pownce and jaiku today I discovered a new federated open source alternative called identi.ca that looks like a pretty promising alternative. The software that powers identi.ca is called Laconica and anyone can download the source, tweak it and run it on a server of their own choosing. This is incredibly important because it moves microblogging from the closed, centralized, company dominated realm into the decentralized internet service realm of email, irc, rss and dns.