Goodbye to old Identi.ca (shown below)

Summary: Identi.ca returned to full operation late on Monday and it generally looks good. The upgrade took longer than expected and soon after this site's return, the front end went down again for a couple of hours. We look at how this affects Techrights now that it's all back to "live" mode with some bugs.

Identi.ca is a fast communication medium that many of us at Techrights use (personally I've used it for 2.5 years, longer than I was on Twitter). It has transformed into something more like Google+ or Diaspora rather than microblogging (like Twitter).

Identi.ca upgraded to a new version over the weekend and this affects how some of us communicate and how our IRC channels are run. Since yesterday, the rightmost sidebar column (along with ladder-shaped Twitter feed) contains more information of interest. it is based entirely on some Identi.ca feeds that bring information from somewhere out there quicker than blog posts can. The new Identi.ca seems to have not lost backward compatibility as Chokoq, for example, still works fine (without software updates on the client side) and so does the IRC bot (dependent on the new page layouts and APIs). One can see new features on the server/service side, but there are not so many of them. It's mostly about improved usability and simpler conversation facilities. Experimental new features include data export (which seems not to work based on my tests). During the migration some metadata was lost, but it could be recovered manually (salvaged even) from cache. The timelines got a little too verbose and Identi.ca accounts are therefore getting a little too much input.

"It has transformed into something more like Google+ or Diaspora rather than microblogging (like Twitter)."We are not sure whether it's strictly just one background picture for all users (standardised like Digg or Facebook, as opposed to older versions) and Twitter is not as well connected as before (there was a bridge to allow Identi.ca users to maintain a mirror in Twitter, but it is not available now, perhaps temporarily).

There are clearly some new bugs, e.g. in "Tags", which won't show up in anyone's case and the upgrade did not migrate these data fields, either. But that's fair enough, it's a limitation of Web-based software and it requires ironing out.

The bottom line is, things are significantly improved following the upgrade and it was worth the wait (scheduled downtime). Because of the licence, it is the only such service we ever endorsed. ⬆