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"First there was Twitter.\u00A0 Then there came a host of other services that tried their hands at status microblogging, the most of which fell by the wayside as Twitter gained dominance.\u00A0 Then came FriendFeed, and some folks realized that this short style of blogging, conversing and status-updating was pretty fun.\u00A0 Then people remembered Utterz, and started playing with that again.\u00A0 Then Twitter started failing, so a few folks tried Plurk.\u00A0 Most of them came back to Twitter, and then everyone left for FriendFeed, but still felt a Twitter-sized hole in their heart.\nSo now there's identi.ca to make you feel better about everything.\u00A0 Drop your Twitter account now and sign up for identi.ca.\nThat's great, except that narrative only exists in the mind of we tech bloggers, as described by the scads of Twitter is Down stories from recent months.\u00A0 The rest of the world, for the most part, continues to use Twitter (whenever it lets us), and increasing numbers of us are now using FriendFeed.\u00A0 As I stated before, the number simply aren't there to support a mass migration to any other platform other than Twitter.\nFrom what I've read so far, identi.ca is \"surprisingly easy\" and a \"freedom seed.\" That may be true, but one thing it isn't is a distributed Twitter. It is open source, however, and if you sign up for service on the main domain, and you for whatever reason don't like the current incarnation or distribution, you can download the source, install it on your own server, and use that distribution instead.\nUnfortunately, this a solution that fixes no problems. The main reason that no other Twitter-clone has taken off substantially is the lack of community on the other systems.\u00A0 As Corvida pointed out recently:\nNo matter how much we hate the Twitter system, we love the Twitter community. That\u2019s what makes us put up with Twitter\u2019s bullshit. We know just how hard it would be to find what we\u2019ve found on Twitter. We\u2019ve been looking for it for so long and whether or not it was there before, the community was never there the way it is today on Twitter.\nI'm a huge fan of the distributed Twitter concept, as discussed several times by Dave Winer. Twitter may eventually fix their problems, but the service itself is so multi-purpose and useful, it deserves to be it's own service that comes with your Internet account, just like email, the Web and FTP.\nUntil identi.ca gets that built in, there simply is no compelling reason for me to switch. They, like Plurk and Twitter, will be eventually plagued by scaling problems. Unless they reach a point where scaling is an issue, they'll be devoid of the people I want to talk to and meet.\nThe good news is, as the project is based on an Open Source platform, there is the possibility that it'll eventually go there and become a distributed Twitter.\u00A0 Given that, there's a possibility I could come back to these pages one day a huge evangelist for identi.ca, as I was for Twitter.\u00A0 Until that day comes, you won't see me on identi.ca, unless the community of Twitter picks up in unison and moves over there."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2008/07/02/identica/>