http://identi.ca

When it comes to microblogging, a few services come to mind. These include; Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku and even Plurk. After doing a brief study of microblogging providers, identi.ca became my choice.

Identi.ca was launched in July 2008 and it has a similar interface to twitter. The reason I chose Identi.ca over twitter was primarily because the nick I was after was taken and it looked like a solid alternative. One aspect that appealed to me was that it runs on an opensource platform. I am not the best person to persuade people to use open-source alternatives over commercial service providers so I post Carsten Norgaard’s post on the article: status.net coming soon.

CarstenBN – April 2nd, 2009

Matt:
On Twitter the information simply exists on Twitter, they are the central where things are going on.
With decentralized Microblogging like OpenMicroBlogging, Laconica/identi.ca, etc., you can be registered at one community and yet get in touch with people on other communities (which would be compared to being registered at Twitter but being able to microblog with everyone using Jaiku).
Compared to Twitter, what you also get is features for socializing that that service doesn’t currently have properly implemented: message tags, groups and profile tags.
Finally, there’s no confusion about who owns the posted content on these services, or mostly isn’t. For example on identi.ca content is distributed through a Creative Commons license, meaning you own it but others can use it, whereas Facebook for a short while had it made so they owned all the content even if you removed what you posted. Who owns Twitter’t content? I don’t know.

I think identi.ca is a functional alternative to twitter. If you don’t have a microblogging account and are thinking of getting one, consider identi.ca as an option. I find that twitter like facebook has more of a social and informal aspect about them. I feel more comfortable asking people in a room whether they have an identi.ca account rather than a twitter account but that’s just me.

Here is the link to my account: http://identi.ca/rbravo