Identi.ca Apps & Why It Could Blow Twitter Away

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Posted on : 03-07-2008 | By : Corvida | In : Social Media

identica I’m on Identi.ca and I’m loving it. Discovered it via Marshall Kirkpatrick’s post on ReadWriteWeb (Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom). I’m also on the phone with Sarah Perez discussing what the latest verb for identi.ca will be. Yes, we’re true social media fanatics and yes every microblogging service needs a verb. You can follow me on identi.ca at http://identi.ca/corvida
    

Identi.ca is basically a great alternative to Twitter. The user interface is nice and simple just like Twitter. It’s like a Twitter clone with a bad name, but it’s open source unlike Twitter. So what’s bad about Identi.ca?

  • The community is small.
  • No way to track replies thus far
  • No groups
  • No direct messages
  • No easy way to follow people (suggested by Sarah Perez)
  • No client
  • No apps really       
    identica

     
Future Features for Identi.ca

So, Identi.ca has a plans for tons of a ton of great features including:

  • SMS updates and notifications
  • A Twitter-compatible API
  • More AJAX-y interface
  • Maps
  • Cross-post to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
  • Pull messages from Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
  • Facebook integration
  • Hashtags
  • Image, video, audio notices
  • Automatic url-shortening
  • Multilingual interface (using Gettext)          

Get Replies in Identi.ca And More

So far there are a lot of people flocking over to Identi.ca. I managed to attract over 100 people in less than 5 hours and there’s more coming in. So for those that are already on here are some things you can try out to manage Identi.ca.

First, Identi.ca needs to get a replies tab ASAP! In the meantime, you can use this greasemonkey script that adds a reply button to the identi.ca UI. Works like a charm too. Also, Dawn aka geekygirldawn has created an identi.ca reply sniffer via Yahoo Pipes. You can subscribe to the feed for replies.

Also, Ping.fm has added integration for Identi.ca. That was fast!
   

Add Identi.ca to FriendFeed

If you want to add your rss feed to FriendFeed just grab your profile url and tack /rss at the end of it. (e.g. http://identi.ca/corvida/rss)

I’ll keep you posted on more as I hear about them and you’re more than welcome to leave a comment or email me (shegeeks [a] shegeeks/net) if you have an app in the works or know of one for identi.ca.
       

identica_reply
    

Why It Could Be The Next Twitter

blog Plain and simple, I’m developing a community on there, a community that is active on Twitter and identi.ca and are early adopters with related interests. In fact, I’ve been writing this post for some time now and I’ve been on the phone with Sarah Perez and sending messages to identi.ca and talking about identi.ca. People are itching for the community that they’ve created on Twitter to move elsewhere. So far, identi.ca is slowing soothing that itch. While it still has a long way to go, if Twitter doesn’t get its act together within the next month or two, identi.ca can definitely usurp it and I’m willing to bet my blog on that…almost. Check out more about Identi.ca with Sarah Perez’s latest post “Identi.ca Early Adopter Tips”.
   


Identi.Ca Gossip

Scobleizer, Scoble, Shel Israel, and 1938media usernames are being squatted on. I wonder if Techcrunch is being squatted on?

      
Identi.ca Verb

So Identi.ca needs a verb, not to mention a new name. So here’s a poll of suggested verbs (similar to “tweet” for Twitter”):

Popularity: 16% [?]

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  • twitter
  • williamgeorge
    Now is the perfect time to release, when Twitter is failing, and people are looking for refuge. Also, it’s open source, which means the best and the brightest software engineers in the world will have a chance at creating a scalable, decentralized Twitter clone. Even on Day 0, so much happened. There was an issue with RSS that people pointed out when importing to other services like Friendfeed, and evan fixed it within an hour. There were no Replies, so people took it onto themselves to write a Greasemonkey script and a Yahoo Pipe. Many people already started looking at the code.
    =======
    george
    foreclosures
  • Looks scary. Twitter better get their act together before they get bumped out of the way.
  • SEO
    Twitter has already becoming a habit for many social media addicts out there. It will be difficult to kick Twitter out of the market, moreover Identica is simply a cloneof Twitter and has lesser features too.
  • a great write up of the identi.ca. it's interesting to arrive to a new service with a list of assumptions of what is needed thanks to the bad experiences most of us have had with twitter.

    for me, the killer feature that identi.ca must have over twitter if it's to be viable is the ability to scale without the dreaded fail whale. everything else is gravy.
  • If it's the "twitter killer" then it just needs to hurry up and kill it, because I (and I suspect many others) simply don't have the time for follow multiple services, which many will have to do until everyone jumps over to identi.ca (if that even happens).

    I feel like each time something like this comes like this it just causes more schmuggling (social media juggling) by everyone involved, which hurts the community overall.
  • I think almost everyone agrees that taking microblogging the open source way is interesting and worth watching. But, in the mean time, someone please explain to me how it is you can build a community with no replies. This has potential, but is a pre-pre-alpha stage service imho. Now until it gets polished, if it ever will, why don't all of you flock to Jaiku? You know, that actually works and has, by far, the best support for conversations. And don't say it's closed. www.jaikuinvites.com FTW.
  • mterenzio
    Feel free to Try Twitter.IM if you normally get notifications from Twitter to GTalk. If you use the same GTalk account for Identi.ca it will aggregate and also post to/from both sites. ; )

    http://twitter.im/register/
  • Does the verb have to be something flashy? How about the simple, standard, easily groked term "post"? It's worked well for blogs, BBSes and snail mail for years.
  • I was thinking "note" (140 characters is about as much as you could comfortably fit on a Post-It). "Post" has a strong established meaning for a longer piece of text.
  • But there's something fun about a community having its own lingo.
  • nice work again!
  • Well it doesn't seem like the platform foundation is working that good. But whichever PR agency is behind this (I have my idea), they sure got a lot of people enthusiastic about identi.ca.
  • i was wondering about the pr too, the service is definitely not as great as the hype it currently gets, there is better stuff out there... what do you think, who is behind this pr campaign?
  • Guys, as a friend of Evan, whose service Identi.ca is, and an early tester, I can tell you for a fact that it's entirely word of mouth. I've been amazed at the good buzz that everyone's generated, and I don't think he expected quite this much, either.
  • ok, so why does it get the buzz, while the other hundred 'twitter killers' don't. it's not the quality of the app, see my comment below, others are far more promising, at least imho... i don't believe in miracles...
  • The site has fallen over dead. So at least it has successfully copied *that* particular feature from Twitter.
  • Speaking of scalability, it's already painfully slow! What will happen as more and more sign up to check it out?
  • i like identi.ca because its open source, written in php, and easy to hack. but my guess is that it won't be very scalable either, so we have the twitter problem again. neither php nor ror were developed to handle such a messaging service, the only real alternative is twoorl and i don't understand why there is not more hype about this erlang app.

    this one would actually have the potential to become a twitter killer, imho...

    http://twoorl.com/home
    http://code.google.com/p/twoorl/
    http://github.com/yariv/twoorl/tree/master

    btw, my identi.ca account is here:

    http://identi.ca/marcuhlig/

    cheers
  • This is not only about Identi.ca but rather about Laconi.ca of which Identi.ca is just the reference deployment. In spite of all its functional shortcomings, Laconi.ca is the embryo of a truly open microblogging network based on federation. It is still HTTP polling, so the scalability problems shown by Twitter are still there, but at least it is open so that will be fixed. The Identi.ca roadmap advertises plans for polling and posting to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Facebook etc. - so I would infer without having looked at the code that it has at least some support for modularity at the transport level. This means that future development of a XMPP publish-subscribe transport used in parallel to the proprietary protocols is probably possible. If Laconi.ca provides the Web user interface, the connectivity to proprietary networks and enough buzz to recruit a critical mass of users, that is a great start ! We’ll soon see if XMPP publish-subscribe can make that party even better.
  • yupp - nice post, im not sure, but you can use ping.fm with Identi.Ca too.
  • This is a good link, actually AFAIK, the first post about identi.ca
  • you rawk! thanks for this! :)
  • Cross-post to Twitter + Pull messages from Twitter + Gtalk Support. Now i can give up Twitter IM Bot to replace it by Identi.ca Gtalk bot, can I?
  • I prefer ping to ding, but didn't have that option above. ping is universal/generic across sites.
  • nice post :)
  • Great post, thanks! You're the Queen of Identi.ca Cordiva!!

    My vote = dent (sounds like the site name, it's easy to remember and it sorta makes sense)

    http://identi.ca/susanbeebe
  • So basically there's nothing right now, and all those cool new features will come, but it's already the new Twitter killer? That sounds a little precipitated, doesn't it?
  • It could be a Twitter killer because of the community, not the apps. :) And people are willing to wait a little for features as long as the platform's foundation works.
  • Nothing new? Wait...it's .ca That's totally new! Maybe the new verb can be something Canadianish?
  • Great idea! There's a 24/7 Canadian restaurant called Denny's that everyone knows how to find, parking is great and the coffee's always on. How about calling it a 'deni' ? Kinda rolls off the tongue nicely:)
  • canadian verb? that would imply they actually do something up there! [joking]
  • Yeah we do a lot up here. We go down there, see what you are doing and copy it. Keeps us VERY busy.
  • LOL
  • lol any suggestions on that?
  • On the verb, how about playing off the .ca domain AND the bird theme. Tweet -> Caw (you know, like the sound a crow makes)
  • I think getting away from the Twitter name entirely is only a good thing. Playing on someone else's trademark makes your service seem like a derivative of theirs, which Laconi.ca/Identi.ca aren't.
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