I’m a huge fan of microblogs. One of the most impressive sites in the microblog space right now is Identi.ca. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. It’s an open source implementation of a protocol called Open Microblogging.

OMB is an open protocol that provides an alternative to Twitter and friends by allowing a distributed group of servers to handle the social network. A user at one site can easily subscribe to a user from another site, and they all just get along. Imagine if you didn’t have to sign up for Pownce or Jaiku to follow friends who preferred those platforms. This is huge.

But like any other platform, there are bound to be flaws. The first patch has already been released, and this was a huge bug: all Identi.ca users authenticating via OpenID would have their password set to blank, and anyone could log in using that username…

Identi.ca users, I’d like to hear from you. If you knew there was a huge security hole in the platform, would you want it plugged? Is recognition and timely response from a free, open source project too much to expect? Or should users be expected to troubleshoot and patch the platform themselves to ensure its security?

Let me know what you think (comment below!).

And feel free to follow me on Identi.ca :)