Identi.ca is born and with it comes the cries from many a social media veteran, “how much micro-blogging is too much?”
In case you slept in this morning, you missed the launch of, and subsequent mad dash of FriendFeeders and Twitterers to, Identi.ca, which is really just an Open Source version of Twitter (think Twitter + the enterprise) without the bells and whistles (coming soon) that Twitter has been dangling over our heads for the past few months. Of course I was part of the mad dash, and you can find me on Identi.ca as jbruin, and here’s a little snapshot of my home page. Looks like an ugly Twitter right?
As the RWW piece points out, one instantaneously digestible bonus to Identi.ca is that you can post and receive updates via IM, which of course is what I’m doing just because Twitter won’t let me and the nifty AIR clients haven’t been developed yet.
Is Too Much Micro-Blogging Making People Sick?
With the excitement and enthusiasm of a working version of Twitter, there also comes a growing sentiment that we’re all reaching micro-blogging capacity. We’ve got the obvious sites like Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, FriendFeed, Brightkite, Twitter, a handful of lesser known sites, and even Facebook updates, that make the business of updating one’s status online or via SMS ubiquitous, never-ending, and impossible to manage.
Status update management becomes a tricky business and sites like Ping.fm are there to “help,” but they complicate the picture even more because if your tweets are already feed to FriendFeed and Facebook, and your Brightkite notes are feeding Twitter, there creates a rather unruly mess to unravel the status update web. I constantly find myself thinking, “so how many different sites will I be updating if I post this message, and how many duplicate entries will appear in Twitter and FriendFeed.” It’s one big headache.
As human beings we can only consume so much micro-blogging content and services before we reach capacity, and feel the need to purge whatever it is that is weighing us down. Something’s gotta give. So, who’s going to be the first die? The Inquistr post on Identi.ca suggests that the Twitter whale could be dead in the water, but I tend to think Twitter will live on – much like MySpace became the social network for the mainstream and Facebook emerged as the better alternative. What do you think?
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