Are you tired of building your Twitter profile up to an awesome pagerank, just to see “nofollow” slapped on all your external links?
All right, listen up. I’m going to let you in on what must have been a well-kept secret in micro-blogging.
There’s an open-source version of 140-character microblogging out there, and they don’t add the ridiculous nofollow tag to your outbound links. Yeah, that means you can actually get some credit for your micro-blog stream if it comes to be well-regarded and noticed as an authority on its own. Sure, most URL shorteners are redirects, but at least the search engines will sort of be able to follow those. If you want, you can just link the long URL.
I’m not sure how many people use Identi.ca – obviously the total population is much smaller than Twitter’s – but the fact that you can network up and microblog in an open-source environment is actually pretty exciting to me. This means people are writing apps for it all the time, and its really easy to set up bots for whatever purpose you need. I don’t know too much about APIs and scheduling automatic tasks, but a quick trip to TwitterFeed got my RSS feeds set up into an Identi.ca stream in just a few seconds. Now every new post I make on a blog or for an article directory has some automatic dofollow backlinks and public exposure. Without touching another option I was even starting to pick up some followers who would end up republishing my updates on their pages as well.
Of course, you can also set your favorite tags and join groups with similar interests. With Twitter, you have to do all the socializing yourself, and often on other websites or by stalking users you don’t know by searching for their post keywords. Its a one-way vortex of web time consumption, and they don’t even let link juice escape that black hole!
Is Identi.ca just flat-out better than Twitter? Why yes, I do believe it is. So be sure to check it out. Like any resource this good, it can’t possibly last forever at this level of usefulness and link popularity, so don’t wait around for tomorrow or the day after – go sign up an account and get your feed(s) hooked up today! Heck, go big and start a group for your niche or internet marketing in general!
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