The microblogging concept is now much more connected in many ways to Twitter the most popular of the microblogging sites. But there are many more out there each offering some minor add ons to the basic text based messages. Tumblr, Plurk, Jaiku, Foursquare, Nairobi-stique and Twytravels (of course!) come to mind. Pownce was shut down a few years ago. Another microblogging service that is now getting airplay due to the nature of its source code is Identi.ca. Identica runs on the free and open source Statusnet software. The rise of this site due to its open source nature has aroused claims from certain experts that it will be a major competitor to Twitter's dominance. I will mostly focus on the features that Identica has that Twitter does not have. Since I do not want to bore you with much talk, let’s dig in.

Attachments

Have you ever thought of posting a file e.g. music fie or photo together with a tweet but reality struck you that Twitter does not offer such a service? This feature is implemented on its open source competitor, Identica. You can share music files, photos etc by attaching them to your notices. Just click on the ‘attach file’ icon next to the notice form to share your holiday photos with your subscribers. I don’t quite understand this but it seems that particular URL’S carry attachments automatically.

Geolocation capabilities

Starting from sometime last year Twitter included the ability of adding the location to ones tweets. That means that the location from which a tweet is tweeting from will be added to his or her tweets. But, did you know that this feature was in built in Statusnet even before Twitter implemented it. That means that Identica, which was started in 2008, was already using it even before Biz Stone and company picked it up for their creation. The beauty of Identica’s geolocation capabilities is that even a map is displayed on a user's profile page showing from where they are posting from. The sharing of ones location per post on Identica (and on any other Statusnet using site) is implemented via Mozilla’s IdentiFox plugin.

Threaded Comments

Now where can you get this on Twitter? Nowhere, not even on your private stream once you log in into the site. The reply system on Twitter only appends the ‘@ user’ syntax to the tweet. On the other hand, clicking on the "Reply" button on every notice on Identica not only includes the ‘@ user ‘ syntax to the notice but also links it to the commented notice. This reply always has clickable text at the bottom reading ‘in context’. Clicking on this link will send you to the page where all the threaded comments/notices for that particular notice are displayed.