One might ask, if the world needs another microblogging system. My answer is:
Yes, definitely.
I have been working on similar ideas for a long time in my own ivory tower, but the success of twitter showed evidence, that there's a demand for microblogging out there in the real world, and not only in the geek-sphere.
If a kind of communication service gets more important, there should be two things to support further growth: Competition and interoperability. We need more than one telephone operator, more than one Internet service provider and we also need more than one microblogging service.
We need more competition. Twitter is a handy service, but even if they are more reliable now, than they were several months ago, it's not a good idea to depend on this single company. I'm not only talking about the fact, that they might run out of money, if they can't develop a solid revenue model. I'm also concerned about to whom I give my data, to whom they might sell it to in the future. I want independency to build my own private service for closed groups, if there's a need. I want the possibility to add some -for me- important features. There's a German expression for that:
„It's good, but not the end of the flagpole yet“
Laconi.ca (the software behind the identi.ca service) is another known microblogging software and it's developing fast. There are two major advantages about twitter:
- It's open source
- It's using standardized protocols, to enable users on different instances to follow and communicate with each other.
That sounds good. But I missed several features, that I already had in my own software:
- Mobile device detection
- integrated photo upload
- twitter integration
That's the reason, why I decided to continue my work and publish it under GPL. I hope to finish a first package for interested people soon.
Maybe there's somebody out there, who is interested in this piece of software to build their own service. Please contact me.
