AUTHOR: Calvin Robinson
DATE: 7/25/2008 03:26:00 AM
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BODY:
I have been trying to work out why I like identi.ca so much compared to Twitter. After just reading a post by SheenOnline I think I have finally figured it out.
Twitter is about people broadcasting to masses of followers. identi.ca is about people having conversations via micro-blogging.
I think this is probably why I have been enjoying using the Twinkle/Twitter combination so much lately. I never use Twitter on its own - its like talking to myself. But when I use Twinkle, I have active conversations with people in and around my area. Infact Twinkle is growing quite a nice community in the London area - I see a lot of the same faces having conversations via Twinkle, on a daily basis. Twitter alone however, is just me listening to the big Tech Bloggers tell me they just made a new post on their blog... Not interesting. Maybe that's because a lot of my irl friends don't use Twitter?
On identi.ca I took a different approach. I subscribed to a lot of like-minded people - techies and geeks. A lot of these people also sub'd back. I've been witnessing, and taking part in, actual interesting conversationg over identi.ca. The kind that you wouldn't usually see on Twitter every day.
So I think Twitter will only get use as a by-product of Twinkle, and identi.ca will be my main sourse of micro-blogging/communication with the tech world.
I'm not a big FriendFeed user at the moment, but I'm going to subscribe to a few more people, and see if I can get into it.
BrightKite seems like a waste of time to me. It is sort of like Twinkle, for the PC, only it doesn't use any real kind of location-awareness. Twinkle's iPhone GPS awareness gives the added sense of "these people are tweeting from my area" where as brightkite doesn't have that, because you can just type any address in there that you want. Doesn't seem real. Also, the London community on brightkite is non-excistant (true, it is still invite only, that will affect it), so there's no real reason for me to use this service.
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