Open Source Twitter Rivals to be a success??

With the constant stream of Twitter “rivals” moving into the Web 2.0 space, it seems odd that companies such as Identi.ca or Jisko.net want to rival Twitter in a “open source” fashion. I would be really interested to see just how transparent they make this system with it’s open source features, of course if Twitter had got its act together on things I am sure we would have seen a open source Twitter come along.

A Techcrunch article quoted identi.ca’s open source platform as a way of “distributing the load” of the service to other’s server. Evan Prodromou, developer at identi.ca also made the point that Twitter would have also improved uptime and scability if it had been “decentralized”, many people wrote about this concept of a decentralized Twitter, my favourite has to be the post Andrew Baron of Rocketboom made on the matter, he even suggested that people should start using the microblogging service Tumblr to help spread the load of conversations.

One commenter on the blog post said “cross-posting to Facebook/Jaiku/etc. is pretty much distributed micro-blogging”, I am constantly frustrated with this idea that people would spread the conversation to Facebook, its appeal as a social network is far greater then it’s conversational aspect. I would much rather throw a sheep at someone, then discuss something with them. The only benefit of reaching out to Facebook is the increased traffic, but of course many of you will know Facebook has its own “status updates” facility built in. So this idea of updating Facebook via Twitter is completly redundant.

But how does open source hold up in a microblogging world, some reckons that social media microblogging will only mature when open source microblogging gains more popularity. In some respects does the Twitter API count as someway to be “open source”, many applications such as Twhirl, Twitterfic, Friendfeed uses the API, but just how much further is Twitter willing to push the boat out, will it go as far as open source?

With identi.ca and Jisko.net opening up the open source platforms to new levels, I think we will see Twitter maybe extend it’s API into open source form, but maybe just maybe they will need to address the matter of uptime first:

http://joshchandlerblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/why-does-twitter-have-so-much-downtime.html