{"id":9500,"date":"2011-03-14T12:34:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-14T20:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wapreview.com\/?p=9500"},"modified":"2011-03-14T12:45:12","modified_gmt":"2011-03-14T20:45:12","slug":"moving-from-twitter-to-identi-ca-mobile-clients","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/9500\/","title":{"rendered":"Moving From Twitter to Identi.ca – Mobile Clients"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Identi.ca<\/a> \"dabr.myopticlunacy.com\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On Friday Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s Product Manager for the Platform \/ API team dropped a bomb on third party Twitter app developers with a post<\/a> on the “Twitter API Announcement” <\/em>Google Group that included the chilling line “…developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience,\u201d he wrote. The answer is no.<\/em><\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarver’s statement was echoed\u00a0 by recent changes in Twitter’s terms of service. Techcrunch did a comparison<\/a> of the new and the old TOS and it’s pretty clear that Twitter wants general purpose third party client apps to go away. Existing apps can stay for now but their position seems precarious.<\/p>\n

Regardless of whether Twitter brings the hammer down on existing apps, independent developers can’t be pleased<\/a> and I suspect that at least some will move their efforts elsewhere.<\/p>\n

I use Dabr<\/a> (mobile web), Gravity (Symbian) and TweetCaster (Android) for almost all my interactions with Twitter.\u00a0 If those apps stop working I’ll be really annoyed.\u00a0 Twitter’s own mobile web apps are pretty dire, there’s no official Symbian app and the Android app doesn’t work on my Motorola i1, which is stuck forever on Android 1.5.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0 think a lot of Twitter users are starting to look at alternatives to the service. I know I am. In addition to the uncertainty around the apps I use, I don’t like supporting companies that jerk their partners around<\/strong>.\u00a0 As a Twitter alternative status.net<\/a>‘s\u00a0 identi.ca<\/a> seems to be the leading candidate. It’s open source, offers a superset of Twitter’s feature set, has a substantial user base and a fair number of third part clients (list<\/a>).<\/p>\n

So I’ve been looking at identi.ca mobile web and app clients.\u00a0 Symbian is covered as Gravity already supports StatusNet and thus identi.ca. On Android it looks like I have a choice of Seesmic, Twitdroid, an official StatusNet client and several others that I haven’t heard of.\u00a0 I’m trying\u00a0 Seesmic.\u00a0 It seems to work well although the process of adding identi.ca account is not at all intuitive. Here’s how:<\/p>\n