Control Yourself, Inc. has launched officially today Identi.ca, an open microbloggling service that takes a radical approach on how new social web services should be built and used.
Identi.ca is Evan Prodromou‘s take on current SaaS and web applications practices. He writes in great detail about identi.ca’s inception in a blog post today. He writes for instance about walled gardens, mentionning how web companies such as Google or Yahoo are accustomed to suck in your data and history, and how most of them don’t allow data portability between different services.
Identi.ca in itself is a service similar to Twitter, in the sense that you use it to tell your network of “friends” about your current activity. The beauty of the system though lies with laconi.ca, a AGPL‘d software that anyone can install on their own servers. Once setup, you can exchange data friend updates with other laconi.ca servers.
If you sit back a while and think about the concept, it solves many problems. It’s for instance an immediate solution to Twitter’s scalability problems — the flow of activity streams are now handled by the users’ servers and not by one single and monolithic web company. It also allows users to customize, add, improve their own version of laconi.ca, opening new ways to use the service, for those who want more security, more flexibility or maybe an in-house closed version.
I foresee laconi.ca as the wordpress of microblogging platforms but in many ways, better. It’s also the only service I know of that has implemented OAuth with a new microblogging standards named OpenedMicroBlogging, used by laconi.ca to authenticate and publish updates to other connected servers. I haven’t myself tried out laconi.ca; as I am still trying to understand the ins and outs of OAuth. Anyways, it’s great to see such innovation, and congrats to Evan!
Comments
identi.ca is like Twitter without a failing whale | Long Blog July 02, 2008
[...] and it relies on the free microblogging tool Laconica. I suggest you read the article on Montreal Tech Watch for more [...]
Montreal Tech Watch July 02, 2008
Identi.ca launches as an open micro blogging service http://tinyurl.com/5uxwvw
Identi.ca Open Sources Microblogging | Techvibes Blog July 02, 2008
[...] Control Yourself has open sourced identi.ca in the form of Laconica, a PHP app. Montreal Tech Watch theorizes that Laconica could become “the WordPress of microblogging platforms”, as [...]
Simon Rain July 03, 2008
I m also trying to understand how this all work and the advantages you would get by installing it on your own server.
I just hope they created a different architecture than twitter to handle all the database queries.
An open source version is still a very good idea. A lot more heads to solve one problems is always good.
Heri July 03, 2008
Scalability is not an issue with identi.ca
identi.ca in itself is just an install of the laconi.ca software
you compare it to twitter, but the 2 are radically different in design.
As i wrote in the article, laconi.ca is able to communicate with other servers. So you install it on your server, and you are still able to get updates from your friends, even if their profile is on their own server or on identi.ca
heri July 03, 2008
@Isatruc it’s like twitter but better http://tinyurl.com/465uot
Simon Rain July 04, 2008
Spreading the load of data on different servers is a very ingenious idea that’s for sure.
I’m going to install the laconi.ca on my server so I can take a look at it.
Also according to this article
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_stays_hip_with_the_t.php
Matt Mullenweg from WordPress is thinking about adding OAuth for authentication so you can post from 3rd party application without giving them your password and for other useful things.
Heri July 04, 2008
Since most people don’t have their own server, I expect that most users will be at identi.ca
In my understanding though, you would still be able to follow users registered on identi.ca
About WordPress and OAuth, i’ve read the article and it’s a good step in the right direction. But laconi.ca does much more. If WordPress implements the “openmicroblogging” standard, you would be able to see for instance your friends’ blog posts in your blog.
Montreal Tech Watch » Identi.ca’s perfect launch July 08, 2008
[...] might be too early to rewrite about identi.ca and give a judgement on the webiste’s success; however, there are already new interesting [...]