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The buzz was alight today in the wake of the launch of new microblogging tool, Identi.ca with many of the usual early adopting suspects dashing to the new site to experiment with anything and everything.

I’ve discussed Identi.ca in a fair amount of depth over at Bogle.TV and won’t rehash or cross post here, however there are a few main points that I want to reiterate about Identi.ca that really sets it apart from the rest of the field.

First and foremost is its status as an open source offering. The tool has been released under a GNU Affero General Public License, and in keeping with FOSS idealism a tremendous amount of emphasis has been placed on freedom.

From the Identi.ca FAQ page:

“The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line
presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).”

Note the reference to taking the source code and setting up shop on your own server. This gives way to the second huge difference between Identi.ca and the rest of the field.  The underlying software, known as Laconia, can be downloaded, installed, and tied back into the Identi.ca network.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb referred to this as a federated architecture:

“I put a customized version of the foundation software (called Laconi.ca) on my server, you put one to your liking on yours, we both get friends on our local copy and any other versions around the web - and everyone can communicate with each other just like we were using the same service from the same provider.”

This immediate reframes the topic of scalability - which has plagued Twitter for ages now - since theoretically Identi.ca could become comprised of a network of interconnected nodes and thus spread the load across a fleet of different servers as opposed to a single cluster.

The realities will remain to be seen of course; however in taking such a different approach to the realm of social networking and microblogging it has become the talk of the town.  Not bad for its first day out of the package.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 1:31 pm and is filed under open source, web communication. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.