Don’t get me wrong – I certainly realize that Identi.ca has a unique value and importance to it (being open source and distributed), but from a user experience perspective it just doesn’t provide enough value for me personally… yet.

I do know that Identi.ca has an API, and kudos for making the API compatible with the Twitter API, so that it lowers the barrier for other apps to support your microblogging service.

What I was referring to is that if you take a look at a lot of the social media services available today – Brightkite, Toluu, and countless others who can extract your Twitter contacts to find users – all of them support Twitter and not Identi.ca. Now, obviously there is no technical difficulty for them to support Identi.ca, but the bottom line is they don’t… yet.

Deleting user accounts in my opinion is a must. It gives users an assurance that, “no worries – there is an easy way out if you don’t like what you see.” That, in turn, makes folks more likely to try out your service. They are after all, providing their own user generated content (which they own) on to your site! They must also have a way to remove it at will. Both Twitter and Plurk offer this.

Speaking of content, let’s talk about licensing. And perhaps you can correct me if I’m wrong – for this is not my strong suit:

The CC 3.0 Attribution license allows users to remix and redistribute your work as long as they give you credit. They can choose whatever license they want to use for their own derivative work, and they can use if for commercial use. Even if your content is deleted from Identi.ca in the future, once the content has been out there, you can’t reign it back in again – the CC license assures everyone perpetual use.

Both Plurk and Twitter explicitly state that you and only you own the IP for your content. You can license it however you want. You preserve your content rights even after you delete your account and content from their service. Only exception is that Plurk states that they have the right to reuse your content perpetually, but only “on their service”.

I’m a proponent of CC-style licenses (you do realize my blog is CC-licensed), but objectively speaking, isn’t Identi.ca’s CC license more restrictive than Twitter and Plurk’s TOS?

Now, it’s true that they reserve the right to change their TOS at anytime. But once they touch the part on who owns your content, I’m sure they will experience a drop off in users. So I doubt that will happen anytime soon.

Eventually, no doubt I will probably go back to Identi.ca again. I mean, social media early adopters are notoriously fickle-minded aren’t they?

And I’m optimistic that Identi.ca one day will be able to show me a better or more unique user experience than it’s competitors, but the day is not here… yet.

Question for you: you mention the “inflexibility” of the license (the very liberal Creative Commons Attribution license — extremely applicable for sharing messages across the Internet and beyond). I’m not sure I understand your point. Are you on another microblogging service that has flexible TOS and copyright rules? Or that lets you choose among licenses?

Surely you don’t mean Twitter or Plurk, neither of which lets you change your relationship with that company, and both of which control your posts after you post them.

Also, are you aware that Identi.ca supports the Twitter API? Many desktop clients (Twhirl, Posty, Spaz), third-party apps (Twitterfeed, Tweetscan), and other parts of the Twitter ecology also support Identi.ca.

Letting users delete their account is a feature that’s been requested a lot. It’s something I need to get to, but there’s lots of data scrubbing involved, and we need to leave some kind of audit trail so that people who were subscribed to you, or you were subscribed to, know what happened. It’s not a trivial feature to implement correctly, and nobody designs database schemas for that kind of thing.