Vanessa Sabino

After the recent attacks that have caused a major downtime on Twitter, followed by many user accounts being compromised, I was wondering if there was a good alternative to Twitter.

In the past I had tried to use Jaiku, and I’ve considered it much better than Twitter feature-wise. Integration with IM and grouping of replies were the two main advantages of their system in my opinion. Channels are also a good idea, but they way it was implemented didn’t make it much better than the tag system used on Twitter. The one real drawback of Jaiku was that my most of my friends weren’t there. And they didn’t want to start using it because most of their friends (who are pretty much the same people) weren’t there. I’ve never been able to overcome this initial obstacle and get a critical mass of my friends in the system so that the others would also join. I was hoping that the Google acquisition would be more influential than I was, but when they released the news that they wouldn’t invest directly on the system, I gave up.

Now Meme. At first, it looks great, you don’t have the often annoying limit of 140 characters, and it is much easier to share pictures and videos. And then you are suddenly struck by the meaning of an image is worth a thousand words. Yes, they are. And when you have your timeline filled with them, there is no space left for anything else. Mere words just won’t draw your attention in the middle of them. It is overwhelming and people aren’t encouraged to contribute with something new because they are too busy consuming what is already there. With few exceptions, my friends can’t draw or make fancy videos. Most of those funny pics and videos I’ll forget moments after I see them. They aren’t personal and they won’t start an interesting conversation. Meme is a very interesting concept on its own, but it doesn’t serve the same purpose as Twitter. It is more like our generation’s replacement for those PowerPoints sent by e-mail.

So let’s get back to something in which the words matter. If you want to share a video, you just send a shortened URL with a brief description. Just like Twitter. But now I’m talking about Identi.ca. They take free software ideas seriously. They implement the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, their software is under AGPLv3 and content becomes Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. You can also post messages using a Jabber client. Apart from that, it is pretty much like Twitter. Unfortunately, that means it’d be hard to convince the average Twitter user that there is a reason to make the move. And without the right people, no reason is good enough to be there.

Where can we find the people, then? Well, when you are looking for something, Google can help! But this time we are not talking about the search engine, Google Reader is what we are interested in. What has started just as a RSS reader, today is much more than that. First you could share links, then links with your own comments, and now you can even add the comments without any link, just like in a microblog! You can share pages with images and videos, but the compact view makes it easy for people to scan through all the content and choose what they want to see. And there is the wonderful “Mark all as read” link that can save you a lot of time in the mornings. But although it has the features of a microblogging service, right now I don’t see people using it as such.

There is also Facebook, but the interface is so cluttered and clumsy that I don’t even think it is worth mentioning in a microblogging post. However, yesterday they brought FriendFeed, so we may have some interesting news coming up.

With that said, I leave the question to the reader*: is there an alternative to Twitter?

* (old trick learned from math books)

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information by Bani