When we first reported about the new microblogging service Identi.ca earlier this month, it looked like an interesting experiment. Since then, its community has grown rapidly and today, it implemented an API that is compatible with the Twitter API. Thanks to this, any application that connects to Twitter can now also work with Identi.ca by simply pointing to identi.ca/api instead of twitter.com.
Dave Winer tested the new API yesterday and reports that everything worked perfectly after he substituted the Twitter URLs with Identi.ca URLs. If this holds true for other developers as well (and we have no reason to believe otherwise), then this is a major step for Identi.ca.
Many new services struggle to build a developer community around their platform. By being compatible with Twitter, though, Identi.ca’s developer pool is now virtually identical with Twitter’s developer community, which means that it is only a matter of time before Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, or TweetBox will make posting to Identi.ca an option.
As Twitter is making it more and more difficult for some third-party developers to hook into its API by severely restricting the number of calls any given application can make within a certain time period, Identi.ca will probably see a lot more interest from developers in the near future.
