This is (potentially) a bit of a mea culpa post. Back in March of last year, I took the decision to stop using Twitter. That decision was essentially ideological but it was made a lot easier by the fact that I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the Twitter service.

Then Google+ came along. I signed up, took a look around and eventually found myself retreating from The Borg. I did, however, realise two things:

• I really much prefer the more conversational stream based approach to social networking rather than the post/comment approach taken by Facebook, Google+ and Diaspora.
• There are plenty of interesting people online who would prefer to stick with well-known, slightly sub-optimal proprietary solutions rather than explore the full range of options.

And if you haven’t already figured out where this is going, I have cleaned out some of my Twitter followers and switched on the Twitter Bridge from Identi.ca. This means that my dents will be posted to Twitter and (if I’m reading the wiki page correctly) any replies in Twitter will be polled into my Identi.ca stream.

Life would be a lot easier if Twitter would federate their service but I am willing to see how this works for a while. Hopefully this will allow me to stay in touch with people I know from other forums (and real life) but we shall see.

It is worth noting, of course, that Identi.ca is still my first choice when it comes to online chatter and you are much more likely to get a response out of me @ExpatPaul than elsewhere.