[Update: OMB is a specification, not a standard.]

Identi.ca launched a couple of days ago now, causing quite a stir. According to Evan Prodromou, the founder of identi.ca, as of 6.35pm EST today there were 10968 users, with the bulk of those signing up in the first 48 hours. There were posts on The Inquisitr, where I first saw the story, Mashable, and TechCrunch, and I’m sure there were many more that I didn’t see. Not every story or all the chatter is positive of course, but when people dismiss identi.ca as just another Twitter clone, they completely miss the point.

The first interesting thing is that Laconica, the code on which identi.ca runs, has been released as open source. This means that developers can jump in and help make identi.ca better, and Evan reports that he’s had some really good help already. Of course, he also says he’s been told he’s done it all wrong, “Wrong language! Wrong protocol! Wrong everything!” Developers are an opinionated bunch.

The open source nature of the code, though something I strongly support, still isn’t the most exciting thing. What’s exciting is that Laconica is built using an open specification, the OpenMicroBlogging specification1. OMB allows for federated microblogging, so I can sign up to identi.ca, my pal Andy can install his own version of Laconica, and we can follow each other, even though we’re on different services.

But here’s where it gets really exciting; because OMB is an open protocol, you don’t have to use Laconica to be in the network. After all, it’s written in the wrong language, uses PEAR DB instead of PDO, has RSS feeds instead of Atom feeds, or whatever else the opinionated developers want to argue about. No, you can write an OMB platform using Ruby, or Python, or Java, or PL/SQL, or Brainfuck, and still follow your friends on identi.ca, any other Laconica installation, or anything else that implements OMB.

I think Duncan Riley is right—whatever happens with identi.ca or Laconica, it’s existence is a game changer.

  1. I’m not saying that OMB is a fantastic specification—it’s only version 0.1 and I haven’t had more than a cursory look—it’s the open specification part that’s exciting. ↩