Here's a social networking/micro-blogging site that I came across about 6 months back but have only recently started looking at more now that Twitter has become more popular.

Identi.ca is a very similar concept to its famed rival, but with an important difference. This one is open source and licenced under a Creative Commons licence. This means that the data I put into the site can be retrieved and ported to other sites easily. I could (if I was so inclined) run a similar server myself. Basically the system is transparent and open unlike other social networking sites.

The idea behind Identi.ca is very simple - users send short posts (or "dents") of no more than 140 characters. The dent will be displayed in a public timeline for all to read and reply to if necessary. There are groups which can be followed and dents can be marked as for a particular group. Unlike a forum though, these dents are still displayed on the public timeline. Words within a dent can be tagged, enabling searching and filtering by keywords.

This site does not have the popularity of Twitter at the moment, and for those who have friends and followers on the rival site can have their dents on Identi.ca automatically duplicated over at Twitter (as "tweets"). Those users who are curious to try this site do not have to cut themselves off from established contacts.

Personally, I love the idea of an open source social networking site and hope that others will see the benefits. Not because I want to see the end of sites which are not open, but because it would be great if those sites would also see the benefits of using open standards and protocols so that we might all be able to easily communicate with each other regardless of which network we are on.

Incidentally, I can be found on either Identi.ca or Twitter under m0gky.

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Tags: internet, communication, social networking