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.

A handful of my friends are over at Pownce – the kind of people that aren’t much into the web scene, and just signed up so we could transfer files easily. But this didn’t last long, when we discovered it was easier to just use msn (as usual) or the new, sexy, dropbox.

Pownce never really did take off. It didn’t have the grand opening, it practically sneaked out of closed-beta. This of course, was be design. But I don’t believe it worked in their favour.

Saying that, the Hype was all there. After-all, this was a Kevin Rose venture. And then you’ve got all the Leah fanboys to take into consideration. That’s why I think Pownce has a very small, hardcore community. They’re as much Pownce fanboys as they are fans of Kevin/Daniel/Leah. It’s all about sentiment.

I honestly never understood the true purpose of the site. But I don’t think many people did. Maybe it was designed that way, maybe the designers were still struggling to find their ground themselves?
This wasn’t quite a micro-blogging site, nor was it quite a file-sharing site. It tried it’s hand at a few things, but other sites always did them better.

The one thing Pownce did have, was a loyal fanbase. That fanbase are going to take this new very hard. But you know what, they’ll get over it. The Pownce crew are still around, the web2.0 elite are still hard at work – we’ll have many more web apps to appreciate in the near future – let’s not lose perspective.

Pownce may not have been the most original idea, or the most well understood application, but it was nicely implemented, it was developed well, and had a great design. These things will not be forgotten – and I’m sure it made Kevin and Leah a bit of pocket change too No doubt TechCrunch will fill us in on the specifics at a later date.

I won’t miss you, but many others will. R.I.P Pownce.