Those who know me are familiar with my general dislike for Facebook. The same reasoning applies to Twitter as well. The fundamental problem with social networking sites is that they are closed communities. Sure, almost everybody is in them, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have to have an account with a particular provider to participate. This isn’t a problem when there is a monopoly, but what if there are two popular services? Years ago this was the case with instant messaging. There were 4 major players, AOL, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ. For the most part membership in these networks was regional. Most of the US favored AOL, though there were pockets of MSN usage as well while Europe went for MSN and Yahoo. (Disclaimer, this is based on personal experience and not any scientific study. Such a study would be interesting, I’ll save that for later.) Most people had only one account. If you didn’t you had to either keep multiple client apps running at once, or use one of the multi-IM clients like Trillian.
Today we have the same problem, but it’s actually gotten more complicated. Instant messaging was a relatively simple application and it didn’t take much for the developers of multi-IM software to figure out how to interface with multiple networks at once. Most social networks these days are instead websites. While a web interface makes these sites incredibly easy to access from anywhere (which also explains the rise of Gmail over IMAP/SMTP based mail services) it means that there is no common protocol for communication. That is until Google Wave takes over. Web APIs offered by many of these services help a little, but nothing can beat the push capabilities and vender-neutralness of XMPP.
So we come at last to my issue with Facebook and Twitter. I am generally a very well connected person. When people see me without my laptop I usually get some pretty snarky comments about it. I am always reluctant, however, to make my communication tools more complicated. I have a single email program for long form communications, and an IRC client for chat rooms and instant messaging (through Bitlbee). I use Google Reader to check RSS feeds. (I’ve tried the RSS reader in Thunderbird but it doesn’t work as well.) Personally I think that pretty much covers any form of communication I need.
Why don’t I think Facebook and Twitter deserve my screen real estate? They are both messaging services. Granted, Facebook delivers a lot of extra functionality on top of it, but at the core it is about sending messages. I already have something for sending messages, both to a lot of people (IRC) and to a single person (IM). In fact, Twitter used to support receiving updates over XMPP (Jabber). Now it doesn’t, so I stopped using it.
Enter Identi.ca. On the surface it is exactly the same as Twitter, but with two important differences. First, the platform is open-source. While I personally don’t want to start my own similar service, it is good to know that the code is freely available. Richard Stallman has been making a big fuss about this recently. Second, it supports pushing updates over XMPP (my favorite) as well as SMS and can update your Facebook and Twitter status just so your less fortunate friends can keep up with you too.
Does this mean I’ll join the micro-blogging revolution? Maybe. At least now I’ll be happy about it.
“Less fortunate friends” – hilarious.
It always amazes me how most of the mainstream technology is a matter of “how do we take something that’s already out there, wrap it up in our own little package, and restrict the user base to our closed service?” The unintended bi-product is when someone chooses a more logical, versatile alternative, others perceive that as rebellion.
I’ll check out Identi.ca when I have some downtime. Sounds curious.