By Scott Westerman
We’ve watched them rise and fall. Jaku and Pownce to name two, have tried.. and failed to unseat Twitter as the dominant micro-messaging application on the Internet.
Now, perhaps, there’s a new contender who may get some traction.
Many of us have come to love Twitter. I have north of 500 friends I follow over there over four different identities. As @comcastscott, I’m learning a ton from Comcast customers about how we can improve our service. And with cool tools like Summize and Twitterbot, Twhirl and TweetLater, I’m able to maximize the value of the service.
But Twitter can also be a royal pain. For whatever reason, and there are many proffered, Twitter is easily overloaded. It’s often down when I need it to be up. And sometimes my Tweets end up lost in the ether and I have to enter em twice.
And my biggest Twitter beef is that it’s not open source. Sure you can mess with the API a bit. But we can’t attack the very limitations that drive us nuts by getting down into the code.
Enter identi.ca.
Identi.ca feels a lot like Twitter. You can send 140 character messages. You can follow your friends. You can disseminate your information via RSS feeds. You can set up your jabber account (GoogleTalk for example) to regenerate your pings on IM. And unlike Twitter, it allows you to share your OpenID if you so desire.
Today, thanks to one of those viral moments that initiate tipping points, people are starting to discover identi.ca. A FriendFeed serach turned this up. And the bloggers are writing about it too, here, here and here.
identi.ca is still in its infancy. You can’t hit a reply icon to easily respond to a post. There is no search engine yet, so you can’t parse the timeline. You can’t search for users on the site. No ability yet to selectively follow someone without sending their stuff to your IM. No SMS messaging of your idents to your cell phone. No bots developed yet to auto post from other RSS feeds. And there’s always the question of how the service will respond when a critical mass of users all get active at once.
But the coolest thing about open source is that everyone can be a developer and if the cards are rightly played, all of these features, and many more, could quickly evolve.
Those of us with adult ADD early-adopt these things like crazy. We have a cynicism meter that is easily pegged by new stuff like this. So many applications launch with promise, only to crash and burn when they can’t adapt to user demands. I’ve seen more than a few skeptics out there who are dipping toes into identi.ca with the “show me” attitude of a Missouri patriot.
But we’ll try it anyway.
I’m already on identi.ca as @comcastscott. It’s another browser window to keep open for now (no twhirl app yet). But I have a sense that this iteration may actually have a shot at assailing the Twitter brand.
Time will tell.
Update:
Identi.ca early adopter tips

By Scott Westerman
Except Dick Rosemont.
It was a sad day when
Saturday night in Alamogordo, New Mexico. It’s 7:15 PM and the house at the Flickinger Center is filling up. It’s not a movie, a rock concert or a stand-up comedian. The Spencers are in town and people are coming from White Sands, Las Cruce and Cloudcroft to see a magic show.
John and I calculated the costs of taking Kevin and Cindy’s show on the road. It takes more than a grand just to gas up the truck one time and moving the magic from their home base in Virginia along the circuit is increasingly expensive. 