Alright, it seems people just aren’t getting it. It’s not that I want to see Twitter die, or go away, or fail… and I don’t just want identi.ca to replace Twitter. That’s not the idea.
The idea is to further MicroBlogging.
That’s it.
Or more specifically… OpenMicroBlogging. Here’s a bit from the spec:
To allow users of one microblogging service to publish notices to users of another service, given the other users’ permission.
So what this means is, opening up the world of MicroBlogging to all… Having Twitter interact with identi.ca with your own server running Laconica (or some other new software yet to be written) or Facebook or Myspace, or whatever. Any site/software that follow the standards of the OpenMicroBlogging spec would be able to participate… and as a user of any of these sites, you’d be able to communicate across services with others. So maybe you prefer how Facebook integrates the OpenMicroBlogging spec into it’s platform, you use them… meanwhile, your friend uses Twitter, and that’s ok, you can still talk to each other as if you were on the same system.
You may or may not remember the old days of silos, when systems could not easily interoperate with each others. Sadly, that’s where we could be headed unless we decide otherwise. I am interested in open source, and open data, and open systems. Freedom from lock-in, freedom to control your data, freedom for new services to come along and challege the establshed services.
How would the world look today if all blogs depended on Blogger? I’m thankful that projects like Movable Type and WordPress (and others) exist, so people have a choice, and the ability to innovate.
I often fear that most people just don’t care about these things, and to those people, I don’t know what else to say. There is a chance you use open source software in some way and may not even realize it, or care. Do you use Firefox? Mac OS X? Google? All of these depend on open source software.
So in the end, I care about MicroBlogging (OpenMicroBlogging to be exact) much more than I care about Twitter or what ever comes out next week.
