by Calvin Robinson on December 2, 2008.

It’s 5 months since I wrote my post about how identi.ca is better than twitter. I still believe this, not a lot on that side has changed. Identi.ca still has the early adopter, techy community. Where as Twitter is more a mainstream site now.

One thing that really hasn’t changed since then, is this promise of cross-platform compatibility. Identi.ca have done all they can on this front – the laconi.ca platform couldn’t be more open, or more compatible with Twitter. Twitter on the other hand, don’t seem interested. Not only that,  but half the clients out there are Twitter-only.

I mean come on, identi.ca uses the same API as Twitter, it’s not hard to get your client working with identi.ca too.

Twhirl have done a good job. It’s just a shame Adobe Air is still a little buggy in Linux. No doubt when that’s ironed out, Twhirl will have a lot more users. The other thing is that Twhirl seems to be being left behind, feature-wise. Twitter Deck for e.g. is brilliant, with its groups, and multiple monitoring boxes, for TwitScoop, 12seconds etc.

Gwibber is a client I have a strong love/hate relationship with. I love it when it works, and hate it when it doesn’t! So far, every new release has screwed me over. I’m not talking about minor features not working or anything like that – I’m talking about not being able to retrieve message. This is the main function, so the client is completely crippled without it. Shame. In fact, Gwibber hasn’t worked on my desktop since I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04.1 to 8.10, and as of today’s update, it no longer works on my netbook (which is still running 8.04.1). Madness. I continue to report bugs, and the usual palaver, but I’m honestly getting bored of the routine. The developers obviously missed Mark Shuttleworth’s memo about Ubuntu, titled “It just works!”.

So it’s about 17 months into my micro-blogging ‘hobby’, and I’m Still clueless as to which client to use. Which is a shame, because micro-blogging is so damn addictive. I mean, I quit Twitter for about 6months, and I only came back when I started using Gwibber, because it posted to my Twitter at the same time as Identi.ca, meaning there was no reason not to Tweet – another advantage to cross-platform compatability.

But I can’t see me leaving either Identi.ca or Twitter anytime soon, now. I’ve met a lot of cool people through both services. In fact got my  new job thanks to Twitter DMing. So the quest continues, to find a decent client. I really don’t want to be stuck using seperate clients, or even seperate web interfaces.

Perhaps it’s time I actually checked out ping.fm? Thing is, I have a FriendFeed account, I just never use it. I don’t want to have a Firefox tab open for micro-blogging. I want it fed directly to a desktop app.

The good news is, I’ve just read that TweetDeck will have Identi.ca support soon (your guess to how ‘soon’ is as good as mine – the post in question was made in October). So until then, I’m gunna try going back to Twhirl.

Oh, I should mention as a courtest, La Twit is great! I removed Twinkle from my iPhone, after months of waiting for them to fulfil the promise of identi.ca support. La Twit offers both Twitter and Identi.ca, and it works really well. Stephen Fry drew my attention to this one.