meta_robert

Identi.ca Version of BeTwittered

With all of the pain of the Twitter service outages and “brown outs,”  people are searching for alternatives.  A VERY promising alternative is identi.ca.  Identi.ca is working toward API compatibility with Twitter.  This doesn’t mean much to most people directly.  It means a lot to Twitter client application developers, though.  I decided to make a copy of BeTwittered that connects directly to identi.ca instead of Twitter.  It took all of 5 minutes to make the basic changes required.  This is NOT a trivial statement.  There is some debugging and clean up to do so that my code doesn’t contain twitter references, but the damned thing just worked!  So, indirectly this affects all twitter users.  All of those nice little Twitter apps can be very quickly adapted and work on identi.ca.  The importance of this goes one step further than might be readily apparent.  Identi.ca is an intentionally open system in the sense that anyone can completely copy it and set up shop on the internet, and then connect to identi.ca.  Open is good. Among other things, this means redundancy and less outage issues, no vendor lock in because they are compatible, and connections among systems so that your friends dont have to chase you from one vendor to the next if you find one you like better. (think about AIM vs MSN Messenger, vs Google Talk vs Jabber vs Yahoo messenger OR Facebook vs Orkut vs LinkedIn vs Myspace … you get the idea)  My rant is done for now.  I have to help make dinner!

UPDATE: BETA VERSION is now available on iGoogle at this link. The screenshot is still for a twitter gadget, and there are two useless tabs (favorites and directs) that I’ve just not taken out, but the gadget is working.