Thu, 13 Nov 2008
Identi.Ca
Identi.Ca bills itself as a micro-blogging service. What is micro-blogging? And what's a service?
Micro-blogging is exactly what you think it is. It's like blogging, right, but it's actually much smaller. To be precise, each post, or dent as they are known, is 140 characters long. That's a little less than an SMS message. You don't have much room in which to flex your literary muscle. That sounds like a bad thing, but it actually isn't.
What identi.ca does is it takes your 140 character message and it displays it for all to see. Anyone can read it, just like a blog. But, because it's micro, they can read it in about three seconds. And because it only takes them three seconds to read a dent, they can read a lot of them. So you have a lot of people able to read about a lot of other people. That's awesome!
In order to make reading things easier, you subscribe to other people's dents. So if someone was subscribed to me, they would see a list of all my dents interspersed with all of their other subscriptions, like this. Those are the recent combined dents of all of the people I subscribe to.
Anyhow, to come back to the nub of the thing, having limited-length messages has two big advantages.
Firstly, you can dent 'Going for lunch' and no-one minds. It can be kind of like Facebook statuses in that respect, except it's much easier to track a lot of statuses at once, it's much easier to set your status and you don't have to use Facebook to do any of it.
Secondly, and this is the bit I like the most, is that you can afford to talk about what you're doing all the time so you get talking to other people who are doing similar stuff, which is very, very cool. I'll probably give some examples of this in later posts.
The length also forces you to be concise, which is something all writers apparently strive for. Getting a dent exactly 140 characters long is actually worryingly satisfying.
Anyhow, that's a bit about what Identi.Ca is and why you might want to use it. This really only just scratches the surface. In upcoming blog posts I hope to talk about tags, cool ways you can send and receive dents and why Identi.Ca is better than Twitter. Reading back over this post, I guess what a 'service' is should also come up at some point.
Posted: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 23:32 | | Comments: 3