I started writing this post last night after my wife fell asleep (a common occurrence). It was about Twitter, and why I twittered. The basic idea was that I enjoyed the micro-blogging because it was closer to a a real conversation than reading someone's blog and posting comments. It's more of a round table where you select who sits at your table. It was personal, and I enjoy that. I've strengthened already existing acquaintances, and created new ones. For something that initially seemed like such a novelty, it's become a great tool.

Then, this afternoon, after a 2+ hour outage of Twitter, a few friends/coworkers pointed me at Identi.ca, which is a fully open source micro-blogging site. I usually just ignored the Twitter clones, because no one I knew had switched. However, it seemed that a few people I was quite interested in "following" had moved to Identi.ca and, as mindless as it sounds, I tweeted because of those around me. So I naturally I got an Identi.ca account.

As I've been using Identi.ca, I've found a problem with it. It has no public facing API. This is absolutely tragic, as that's the only way I use Twitter. I have a little app called gTwitter that keeps me up to date. It crashes often, and I'm not fond of the Mono backend, but it did the job, and stayed out of my way. While Identi.ca apparently allows updating through a Jabber client, I can't get it to work. It has, however, been sending me updates from those I'm subscribed to, through IM. I hate that though, because it's an interruption I don't need.

In defense of Identi.ca, these features ARE planned. It is also an open source app, so any user (including myself) could build these features, and the sky is the limit at that point. You certainly can't say that about Twitter. I just won't jump ship completely until after the features are there.

I've got a little side project I've been putting 5-10 hours a week into (and less recently, as we're moving), but one of the high priorities I've been been working on is a public facing API. As far as I'm concerned, your web site is stuck in 1.0 world unless a user can easily write an external CRUD app with your database as its backend. It doesn't have to be fancy, maybe just a simple REST interface. The new internet is about mashups and using data in creative ways. A public API is THE secret sauce to successful web sites today.