Etherplex

So after it became painfully apparent that:

1. Twitter was an attractive idea
2. Twitter didn’t really fit with the distributed nature of the web
3. Twitter didn’t scale all that well

an obvious opportunity emerged: build a better mousetrap, err, Twitter. And that is exactly what the Laconica software does. Built by Control Yourself, and hosted on their site at Identica, it provides a credible alternative micro-blogging service. But how comparable is identi.ca to Twitter?

Twitter has some trademark features. First, it allows for user control of content: a user can not only post and delete posts, but can mark his or her entire feed as private, which allows for a sort of walled garden. This makes Twitter very appealing to casual users that really don’t like the idea of the entire web reading every update. Identi.ca, in contrast, provides no mechanism to make feeds private, and similarly has no mechanism to delete posted content. Depending on your point of view, this can be regarded as either a bug or a feature.

One of the early promises of Twitter was the ability to deteremine how you received updates. This is a new idea - Twitter allows you to decide to pull data from the service via RSS, HTTP, or the API (in a desktop client like Twhirl), or have the information pushed to you via XMPP (Jabber), or even messaged via SMS to your mobile. This flexibility is quite novel - it decouples how data is inserted into the system from how it is retreived. This is quite different from email, chat, or even other web services like MySpace or Facebook, in that the granularity of control is quite small - I can elect to receive notifications via SMS for updates from my family, but not from old friends from university. Now that Twitter has all but given up on XMPP because of the scalability problems, identi.ca stands alone in its ability to integrate with chat and SMS to provide this decoupling.

Maybe most importantly, Twitter is itself a walled garden. While it gains many advantages from being centralized (like fast updates) it also suffers from problems associated with centralization: poor scalability, single point of failure and data lock-in. Identi.ca avoids these by adopting OpenID (I have an OpenID through the handy ClickPass service), leveraging the OpenMicroBlogging specification, and allowing instances of Laconi.ca to federate together to form a web of micro-blogging services. For those of you wondering why this is desirable, it is in part because the internet is fundamentally a peer-to-peer, federated system. Email, newsgroups and IRC are all decentralized - these are the classic services that define the web. Recently we have started to move away from decentralized services, but the problems quickly emerge. With AOL Instant Messenger, for example, AOL actively seeks a way to monetize the service, and can make life difficult for third party chat clients that don’t support in-client advertising. As a result XMPP (Jabber) emerged as a viable, open, decentralized chat service, which most internet users have adopted without knowing it by using Google’s chat service integrated into GMail. Just as the problems with Twitter’s centralization emerge, we see an open, decentralized alternative emerge, Laconi.ca. This seems to be the natural evolution of the internet.

Is Identi.ca an perfect replacement for Twitter? No - there are enough differences to attract different crowds, but the similarities are strong. Perhaps as Laconi.ca adds features, we will see it become a more viable complete Twitter replacement. You can be sure I’ll be looking into hosting in instance of Laconi.ca at something like ublog.etherplex.org soon.