I love citing examples of the practical uses of Twitter, largely because of the constant references to how pointless and narcissistic it is. In this case I just had an extended discussion with Liz Kolb to try and locate the source of her web camera problems:
Liz: Anyone use DimDim for conferencing? If so, feedback? We cannot afford Elluminate…
Me: @lkolb We’re planning on taking a look at but haven’t had a chance yet. I seem to recall that @MetaWeb20 has used it before.
Liz: @mbogle Thanks I’ll check your reference…I like …

It’s been only a day and a half since I first signed up for Identi.ca and already it seems clear that the new microblogging tool takes open source sensibilities and idealism very seriously.
Open source transparency in action
Evan Prodromou, Founder of Identi.ca, has put in some massive hours covering a variety of activities since the launch early yesterday – most notably including a server migration and subsequent debugging – and amazingly has posted very detailed accounts of his headaches and progress in the form of updates on his Identi.ca profile.
Tirelessly, Prodromou …

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 …

Background
Following the news and ongoing discussions about Twitter lately has been like watching a car accident repeated over and over again. You try to turn away and ignore the carnage, but the sheer horror of it is too much to avoid.
There have been the multiple outages – now a Twitter standard – a lost database followed by another similar occurrence, with Twitter announcing:
“We just lost a database about 5 minutes ago and this has severely impacted the site.
We’re working on recovering from this now.”
followed by
“We’re experiencing a database problem …