Why does everything have to be a killer? I signed up but it looks like Twitter circa its birth versus a new concept. I guess the kill could be the code behind the site, if there is such a kill. - Jennifer Leggio

Because there's a secret Caligula in every social media blogger, Jennifer. - Mark Trapp

They should call it Ishmael. - Oldengrey (Jay)

Jennifer : I'd hazard a guess that the (misguided) male instinct to "kill" or "overpower" has a lot to do with it. I've not met a businesswoman that has ever said the word killer... but maybe I'm wrong. - Matt Harwood

Because someone needs to put Twitter out of its misery ? - Michael C. Harris

think you might be missing the joke - Christian Anderson

Jeez, Louise. Whadya say we wait and see if it can operate for 24 hrs without going down now that there's some real load on it or see if it can provide Jabber support for more than a week first (unlike Plurk). BTW, I can't get it to send me a Gtalk conf code. - Ken Sheppardson

Christian - I got the joke. I'm just sensitive to the word "killer" since everything is called a killer these days. It's losing its meaning. Like "market leading" and "best in class." ;-) - Jennifer Leggio

Jennifer, the biggest point: as much as Indenti.ca isn't brilliant, it just changed the rules. Open source code, anyone can host, cross communications. Even if it fails, it just gave the world decentrazlied microblogging, and once enough ppl on enough services (note multiple) are tied into this, Twitter is dead. Indenti.ca won't do it alone...but it doesn't have to, it's the start of something bigger. Identi.ca is the freedom seed - Duncan Riley

maybe... as long as it doesn't look retarded or crash I'm interested, just kidding! - Susan Beebe

It can only be a killer if it proactively leverages it's synergies with market leading solutions. - Andrew Smith

Susan, the best thing: if it does crash, you find someone else running it :-) I'm betting (presuming the code is usable) that we'll see another compatible provider in a week (I'm also betting Dave Winer is already testing the code), and possibly 4-5 within a month. Every single host is a cut to Twitter. - Duncan Riley

Thanks for the link love Duncan. I agree totally. It's hard not to get excited about an open sourced, decentralized microblogging platform. I'll be watching this one very closely. - Bwana

Duncan - Makes total sense, thank you. - Jennifer Leggio

Andrew - I needed that laugh. ;) - Jennifer Leggio

Identi.ca you have 15 seconds to cat herd all these geeks and make them of one satisfied mine...kthxbai! - Mark Forman

Duncan, does decentralized and open source microblogging mean i can theoretically have a version for my own online community? sorry, not a techie so trying to guess that's what you mean. - Christine Lu via twhirl

I think open source is significant here. There's been a lot of commentary from geeks about how to make Twitter better, and I think a lot of people will take a look. I'll certainly download the code and play around. The big thing though, iiuc, will be that services can talk to each other, and that you can simply change provider, keeping your friends, if yours starts to suck. We can all change to Jaiku but we lose our follow{ee,er}s. - Michael C. Harris

By looking at the source code it seems that it is DB driven. The same mistake that got Twitter in to the mess that it's in. - Gersham Meharg

Christine, in this case yes. I haven't checked out how hard it is to set up yet (and it's early days) but you could host your own service and this would link into every other service running compatible platforms. - Duncan Riley

It'll be nice when the identi.ca folks have had a chance to post more public info on the way the system works, but from a relatively quick review of the source and the OpenMicrobloggingProtocol spec, it doesn't appear the servers talk to one another unless you specifically subscribe to a users's profile on a server remote to yours. Once you establish that link, when the remote user posts a message to their server, their server pushes that message to yours. Like good old email, in a way. Just smaller msgs. - Ken Sheppardson

beginning to sound even more like IRC - Steven Hodson