A buddy of mine pointed me at identi.ca. O.k. where do I start.
It’s twatter, err, sorry, twitter gone nuts… and for free, oh, and the promise not to sell your personal data… but seeing as its opensource freeware all round, the data is also free, and so it is mostly given away for free – obviously you have the option not to use the service 
twatter/identi.ca is a public timeline that subscribers can submit their menial day to while other subscribers can be informed of certain ‘tweets’ from their buddies. When facebook took off, I kinda got on that particular band wagon for a while, but this one… I’m really not sure what the point is.
For example, while I was hamming around:
- Matt was using gwibber and facebook.
- thomallen was having lunch with his wife
- sirclown82’s laptop froze completely to where Skinny Elephants wouldn’t work
- damcla was eating pasta for dinner
Since you can opt to get SMS’s from twatter (and this option is coming soon to identi.ca) when your buddy announces the above, you get charged… I suppose this is it’s own private irony, but it will lead to people policing it, or not using it. Hey, I’m all for more taxing of stoopid people.
In May 2007, there were over 111 twitter look-a-likies internationally… why? who knows, but there looks like there is a need to share every damn second of your life with your buddies… But see how difficult it is tweeting your vinegar stroke… Well, twitter are soon to offer a voice to tweet service… if they can keep their site up for longer than 5 minutes.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is a niche somewhere for this junk. I mean “it’s the telegraph system of web 2.0″ says an obviously deranged author and technologist (man I hate that word as well). I did find one fond reference that made me smile, and almost restored my faith in the stoopid. While googling about what twitter is, I found the wikipedia article, and the bit about twitters use in the media. Apparently some bloke got arrested in Egypt and didn’t have his phone confiscated: he then twatted his mates who then arranged for the press, the US embassy and a lawyer to get involved pretty quickly.
The other one that amused me greatly was the first trade union twitter service was set up in June 2008…
All out