Do you like the idea of Identi.ca?

As I’ve said before, I’m not a big twitterer…

I would say I average maybe 1 Twit every 2 days, in fact I don’t know why I even still use the service. I was never turned off the service from down-time or anything like that, Twitter could go down a whole day or two and I doubt I would even notice.

No, I just never found myself getting addicted, or even fully understanding quite what was so great about the service. In my experience all my contacts use the status messages in Facebook, MySpace and MSN just like Twitter would be used, so why would they need another service?

Anyway, Twitter’s much talked about downtime has been the subject of a great amount of ridicule and dissatisfaction from the blogosphere. What has been interesting however is watching the public opinion a couple of months ago transit from threats and promises of leaving, to a general acceptance that they could never leave Twitter and would even find other ways to support it.

What has come out of the months of downtime is the Twitter clone Identi.ca. I’m not sure about you, but I find the idea vaguely unsettling. It’s one thing for someone to develop a free or open source alternative for something (eg: Firefox and IE) and compete head to head. It’s another thing however to create a service with the express purpose of duplicating and replacing something like Twitter.

There is no unique focus, no goal other then cloning someone else’s hard work with the advantage of hindsight. In fact it’s really building off of the work that someone else has had to do, for example by making the Identi.ca API completely compatible with Twitter so Twitter clients can support Ident.ica with no additional development. I might be alone in that opinion, but to me it just seemed almost like cheating.

I’m sure you’ll let me know what you think.