As it says on the About page, Identi.ca is a micro-blogging service based on the Free Software Laconica tool.
For more about the project, see Marshal Kirkpatrick's Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom, Hugh McGuire's Why Identi.ca Matters, and Edd Dumbill's Why Identi.ca is Important. Personally I'm thrilled by the idea and encouraged by its execution so far, and have been poking cautiously at Laconica for the past couple of weeks, hoping to contribute in whatever way I can. Here's a prototype badge, based on Laconica's RSS feeds and Yahoo! Pipes.
If you see an author's name in a post, click it to explore his or her friends' posts. To visit the author's identi.ca page, click the top link, to so-and-so with friends.
To try this yourself, copy and paste the following wherever you want the badge to show up:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://kentbrewster.com/js/identica-badge.js">
{
"user":"kentbrew",
"server":"identi.ca",
"headerText":" and friends"
}
</script>
Substitute your own ID in the user parameter; many of the other parameters available in Twitterati will also work.
Although we're waiting for the real API, if you find a working Laconica server that forms its RSS urls the way identi.ca does, the badge should work unmodified if you substitute the server name of your choice for identi.ca in the second parameter.
Working through kinks in the real API now ... so far, so good. More to come!
Please keep in mind that this badge will change radically once the API goes live, and will hopefully be hosted by the project. I don't mind if you try it out, but please host your own copy if you put it in production anywhere.
For background information about how badges like this one work, please see Case-Hardened Web Badges, which I presented at Web 2.0 earlier this year.
Have fun, and please let me know how it goes!