I never did get Tweeting - not sure I get Denting either.

The micro-blogging site, Twitter, has been around for awhile.  And the concept is fairly simple…

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

To that end, you are able to post a short (140 character max) message that folks have come to refer to as “tweets”. These messages lets others know what you are doing at any given time. I get the whole concept, but I never really got in to it… just never found much of a use for it, though I have tried on a few occasions.

Maybe I just don’t have enough friends? Well, friends that also use Twitter. Or that are even in to the whole social networking concept. Which is actually rather odd since just about all the friends I have these days I can pretty much trace back to having gotten connected through some sort of online means. Most from back in my AOL days. But I suppose as I have slowly delved more and more in to the world of putting content on the web via various blogs, I was bound to drift towards the micro-blogging here and there.

I recently dove in to Twitter again, figuring it might be a decent way to complemnt some of my posts on this blog with the mini-updates. Of course in the short time I tried to start tweeting again, Twitter.com suffered a couple of it’s famous outages. I figured there had to be something better, and since I really dont’ have any friends on Twitter, I was pretty much free to explore whatever option I wanted. I looked at many, tried a few… and then I wandered across identi.ca

I’m not even sure how I came across it, but basically identi.ca is very much like Twitter, but is built on the open source laconi.ca project. Laconi.ca is trying to do for micro-blogging what jabber has been doing for instant messaging. This may need some explainging for a few folks…

If you are old enough to remember, there was a time when AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy were the big boys in town when it came to getting online. Each had their good and bad, and each had their own way to send messages to other members on their networks. But if you were on Compuserve, and I was on AOL we couldn’t send messages back and forth. Internet email fixed all that. Now you can send email to anyone on pretty much any network.

Instant messaging was like that as well. If you had AOL you couldn’t send an IM to someone on Yahoo! and well, you still can’t. Enter Jabber. Jabber is an open source IM protocol that decentralizes the whole IM concept. So that means if I set up Jabber on my domain, and you set it up on yours… we can easily message each other without having to actually register an account on each others networks.

Laconi.ca brings this concept to open-blogging. Identi.ca was the first, but as of this writing there are just over 30 servers running the Laconi.ca system. And while I have an account with identi.ca  - in theory - I can subscribe to follow the postings of anyone on those other installs. I say “in theory”, because I am not getting it to work right now and need to do some digging to see where the error lies.

I have to give laconi.ca a bit of slack, it’s only been out a few weeks - and in that time the bugs are have been getting squashed and features have been getting added like crazy. I am still not sure that I “get it”, but I am trying. Part of the reason is that I just plain like the open source concept. The other part of it? I’m still trying to figure that out.

Oh, and while I hope to do some more in depth stuff on laconi.ca and identi.ca , but for now I do want to give a heads up about Laconica Tools. Laconica Tools is a WordPress plugin that publishes a ‘dent (the identi.ca version of a tweet) with a link every time you add a post to your blog. It was initially based on a similar tool for Twitter, but the author ended up doing a serious overhaul and re-write, thanks in part to me. Originally he tried a straight port of that Twitter plugin and when I tried to use it… it broke. So the guy basically started over from scratch… and it works great! He’s already planning more stuff for it, but go grab a copy now - you’ll like it.