I’ve recently started using Twitter, discarding (almost) all my prejuices. I’d ever thought microblogging was only about broadcasting you’re walking your dog or that you’re sooo bored, but I was wrong: it’s also an great environment to share short ideas and web pages you like without clobbering mailing lists and post thoughts and info about events and hot topics.
However, microblogging is sadly failing at the same point current social networks are: isolation. If you signup into Twitter, you won’t be able to share your micro-posts with Jaiku or Pownce users, among others. This makes users choose the biggest microblogging network to reach as more contacts as possible, which makes everybody more and more dependant of a central service/company, affecting the neutrality of the web and slowing down innovation.
Nobody would currently accept such lack of openness and neutrality in blogging, so why are we ok with it in microblogging? We need opensource microblogging platforms and reading clients, supporting interconnectivity between services and servers, freedom to migrate from one server to another keeping all your data and a flexible standard and documented API.
I’ve just read that in a README:
Laconica supports an open standard called OpenMicroBlogging
(http://openmicroblogging.org/) that lets users on different Web
sites or in different companies subscribe to each others’ notices.
It enables a distributed social network spread all across the Web.
Could be Laconica the way to go?