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Open Source Twitter Competitor Emerges
ruphus13 writes "Twitter has had a lot of public woes with Open Source technologies like Ruby on Rails, and a lot of alternatives have sprung up in the micro-blogging world, but no one has managed to dislodge twitter in its usage or appeal. Now, an Open Source alternative by Identi.ca, backed by project Laconica has emerged. From the article, 'It supports OpenID for logins, is completely free software, and is designed to apply a Creative Commons license to all the traffic that it carries. It's also built to support the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that (at least in theory) it can attack scalability issues by federating together multiple autonomous servers. The underpinnings of Laconica include PHP, PEAR, and XMPP. You can download a tarball of the source, or check it out directly if you're using Darcs (there's also an unofficial mirror on Google Code, giving you Subversion access for a read-only copy).' The community will still need to work on this, if a true competitor to Twitter is to emerge. It is lacking APIs, and SMS integration. Oh, and millions of users!"
Taking a dump, will read this later.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
What? Does it just slap a CC license on any thing posted on it?
Beautiful, ontopic first post.
Twitter is overhyped, with a very small percentage of the world (mostly in the valley) yelling into an echo chamber, convincing th
Maybe /. should try enforcing a 160 character limit for posts.
It'd certainly take the wind out of rants and loooooong posts.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That's all we need. An open source sockpuppet. Since open source software is usually better it will be able to mask as a regular /.er more effectively. Damn you open source and your effectiveness!
Oh wait, the other Twitter...
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
What use has twitter!?
how useful can one-liners even be!?
That single programmer probably wouldn't have made much of a dent in the situation, but another pissed off programmer took his work, and made it work on his system, twice and got federation to work, then wrote to tell the rest of us about it.
It was only after this that the blogosphere actually has a snowballs chance in hell of adding any value, by making sure that other people know about the efforts of these two programmers (and all of the ones before them).
As he said over at 0xDECAFBAD, '...ideas are fucking worthless', it's actually adding some value to the ideas, no matter how big or small, that get the snowball rolling in the right direction.
I hope this post helps someone else see how open source really works. If not, it's fucking worthless.
--Mike--
Just look at the code. Identi.ca is NOT a scalable solution b/c it does NOT federate out message containers. However, it's a good thing it's open source so nobody can be duped by the uneducated claims.
Resilient, scalable, multicast messaging is a SOLVED problem. Yet, nobody cares to apply the solution in practice. Hers is a starter for those who really want to created a federated Twitter competitor.
http://research.microsoft.com/~antr/SCRIBE/default.htm
I have an section on my website that posts my twitter. In plain text. No fancy background, image-heavy, 'sleek' looking background or whatnot... it's just straight, text that shows my last twitter. It's useful for posting why X thing is broken on my site if I notice a problem from work, or my computer crashes and I want to let people who visit my site know why there's no updates, stuff like that (since I can text a twitter from my cellphone). To keep it from showing the same downtime reason for weeks at a time, I update it every so often with whatever random thought. Once or twice a week tops.
That said, the only reason I use Twitter is because it's the only application I've found that allows me to very easily and quickly post a quick informational update to my website no matter where I am (again, cellphone).
If this open-source option allows that, I'm all for it. Otherwise, I'm not particularly pleased with Twitter as a whole. If anyone knows of any alternatives that allow me to do exactly what I use it for above, let me know... I'll bail Twitter if I can find a better alternative.
Planet Zebeth - Metroid with a twist
All time favorite twitter that pretty much sums up Twitter: http://twitter.com/DieLaughing/statuses/247877862
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
I've never used Twitter so could be completely wrong about this, but: isn't SMS integration the entire freaking point of Twitter? And aren't APIs also kind of important, even more so than imposing a Creative Commons license on all traffic? (I know, I know, Shakespeare could never have written his plays if the Twitter traffic from previous generations hadn't been available for him to adapt.)
Anyway, if I'm wrong, at least I'm still less useless than all the goofballs who know nothing about Twitter except that stupid Penny Arcade cartoon but still feel compelled to repeatedly reference that stupid Penny Arcade cartoon.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's cool to get a good license, no doubt. But the appeal of Twitter to me isn't the software license - it's the service provided. Specifically, it's the timely access they provide to the closed SMS network.
For a while, I was using my wireless phone carrier's email gateway to send my phone text messages generated by server monitoring scripts. When their gateway got clogged and delayed, I discovered that Twitter wasn't. So now my monitors use the Twitter API.
Other than for that, I wouldn't bother with Twitter - and I don't.
So public licensing is nice, but unless they've somehow cracked the gates of the closed SMS network, I don't see much to be excited about.
While it's good that there's new and innovative uses for Open Source, the last thing the world needs is another fucking Twitter.
Twitter is the singular most overhyped (and seemingly overstretched) and in-your-face viral spamming thing since Ron Paul and Facebook. Soooo much sock puppetry.
It's just another dumb passing fad, and if you're not ZOMG 14 you'll probably never use it. Presumably some retard media giant will overpay for it, and then no-one will ever use it again -- just like all the others. The sooner the better please.
The directors of Twitter are just another bunch of jerks who should be first against the wall come the revolution.
Maybe /. should try enforcing a 160 character limit for posts.
Better yet: Enforce such a limit, but only for twitter and his socks ;-)
I use twitter to communicate with rememberthemilk, and I was bored one day so I set up accounts for my computers. So yeah, my computers can send me text messages and I can send them back. If twitter didn't have sms integration, it'd be worthless to me. If my server reboots, it twitters me. Yeah, it's pointless and I haven't thought of a real use. But whatever. =)
I also (sorta..) pay attention to some feeds. Mainly the ones created by NASA people. The Phoenix twitter is really interesting, actually. But they could suddenly stop making posts and I wouldn't mind at all.
Only a small slice of people really follow twitters. I think a microblog in combination with a normal blog is fine.. It allows for someone who people actually listen to in full essay form to make quick comments about things. Case in point: BadAstronomy, though he lacks the integration that would make his twitter feed more penetrating. Just having a microblog.. eh. What's the use.
Several times I've thought about starting up a blog. But at this point in my life (starting my senior year in highschool), I'm going to spare the world about ramblings about nothing because I personally don't feel qualified to have a real opinion yet on anything important. I also do not have a facebook.
I completely love the Open Source aspect of this. That's awesome. OpenID for the win. Yadda yadda.
This isn't a major feat for the blogging community as a whole, but all the standards definitely lead to semantic web. I love xmpp for it's VoIP and file transfers and everything. (Then again, I use IRC moreso).
Just imagine blogs and web3.0. <3
It's baffling to think this 'micro blogging' nonsense is really coming to the point where there's competition for it. Back in my day folks didn't particularly care if you were vacuuming, or watching a DVD. I guess one of the boons of this web 2.0 is convincing people that other people really really care what they're doing at any given time.
Just for the record, I'm currently sitting at my desk in my underpants drinking whiskey right out of the bottle while openly weeping.
I have nothing compelling to say
"OpenMicroBlogging protocol" - we have recently had an article in /. shoving "geomicroblogging" up to us as a new buzzword, had a few laughs about the speed buzzwords are increasing ... made a few jokes myself, but i gotta admit, i would never expect to see a buzzword pushed as a goddamn PROTOCOL. nothing is safe now it seems. next in line will probably be stuff like "UppityGiggidyDataTransfer", "DiddlyDooNeighboring client" and "HeavenlyButtLoadBalancing" - quick !! run while you still have time - so you may keep your sanity.
Read radical news here
What is with the Twitter hate? Seriously, I want to know. I have barely encountered Twitter, and I have certainly not seen any "hype" about it, so maybe I just missed a wave of annoying news articles about it.
The only use of Twitter I have seen is Fred of MegaTokyo's status feed which gives info on how far along Fred is with a comic or why a comic is late. Anyone who is familiar with MegaTokyo is probably familiar with MegaTokyo's common delays, so this info is very useful. The three most recent Twitter statuses appear on the website.
Another poster mentioned that he also has a Twitter feed for website status and has the most recent one appear on the site.
I usually see jokes about constant status updates via Twitter, but, well, no one is forcing you to read them; they are for the people who care about that person's status. Occasionally I am interested in when the next MegaTokyo comic will be posted, so I check his Twitter. I do not see how this is much different from IM status messages: usually if I want to get a vague idea of what my friends are up to, I can check their AIM away messages.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Seriously? Would anyone else consider using PEAR, In this the year of our Lord 2008? Why? Thats not going to scale any better than rails. I'd be very surprised if it scaled as good as rails. It always depends upon how much of it they're using, but you do not hear about large php sites using PEAR for a reason.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
when you state your project uses PEAR as a technology. I don't think I've ever seen someone say "we code in perl and CPAN".
Besides, unlike many languages where libraries are actually useful, I find people who use tons of PEAR packages to be not-so-great-programmers. Avoiding reinvention of the wheel can be a great thing, but not if the only reason you depend on PEAR to an extreme is because the only programming you're capable of is to apply glue between others' work.
Sorry, little rambling about past coworkers.
These are user-acclaimed tweets, most of them just comedic, but some telling whole little stories.
Thinking this way is a bit like trying to think haikus; perhaps why another competitor in the space is called Jaiku.
I thought he meant a core dump
You technical people confuse me all the time ;-)
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
There, I just made insightful all your useless rants. And I still have 100 characters left!
You, sir, are daft.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Each has its own purpose.
[ReidNews]
twitter is for twits. end of story.
Why is Twitter consistently included in the list of over-hyped "Web 2.0" sites? From what I've read it only has a fraction of the active users other sites have and doesn't appear to have features other sites lack. Twitter just seems like a less popular social networking site to me. Is it tweets (messages and updates pushed to your friends list)? Honestly I'm not very familiar with the site, so I must be missing something. Does anyone here use it and know what innovations they offer that MySpace, Facebook, etc. don't?
A trolling parody account based on the main flamebate/troll-ish creator of parody accounts? The plot thickens.. are you the open source twitter competitor that TFA is talking about?
which is totally what she said
Rails is used for the web front-end to Twitter. The scalability problems have mostly been with the backend architecture, and the fact that until recently they ran the service with remarkably few servers and staff. Using $YOUR_HOLY_FRAMEWORK would not have made much difference.
Web tech can scale horizontally. It's not a big deal. Routing gazillions of messages centrally, that might not scale.
XMPP is the long-term answer for this.
Tripcodes have been available for almost ten years, and are far simpler to implement.
...to note that no doubt many of us have at one time or another been thinking "I wonder what's happening behind that window right now" or "I wonder how many people within a hundred meters (or comparable local units of measure) of me are having sex right now" or "boy would it be cool to see the world through that other person's eyes" or "I wonder what that person's life is like". Admit it!
Those of us with a childhood filled with superhero comicbooks have probably wished they could have "x-ray vision" (conveniently cutting through all the things you want it to and none of those you don't) to see into the neighbouring room, or to be able to fly to spy on people through otherwise unreachable windows or to be able to turn invisible and follow them around without them knowing. Fess up!
With the rise of geotagging and the coming of live or near-live video feeds from all around us, we're now getting a glimpse into exactly those kind of situations. What was happening behind that wall or on the other side of the world. What someone else's life is like.
Unfortunately the glimpse is less glamorous than I guess we all hoped for. These other people we would have loved to spy on before turn out to live ordinary enough lives - when they're not goofing off intentionally, knowing they're being watched, that is - and there's not nearly enough sex within a hundred meters of us.
Bummer.
Hey, give the guy a break. He offers up the service for free. As far as I know he's not even making a profit on it yet.
I'm not against open source, I just feel their stealing the guys product, he doesn't even charge for it.
? just for the filter ?
Twitter is a really, really simple application. So why should anyone care about alternatives. Anyone who wants to make their own twitter is likely a web developer and they'll likely code it themselves ... or, not I guess they can use an alternative but ... who cares?
The woes that Twitter has had have nothing to do with Ruby or Rails. It's a scaling issue. Even if Twitter were written in PHP or Python or Java or .NET or Perl or C or Assembly ... it wouldn't matter much. You would still need to put lots of hardware behind it if you had lots of traffic.
Any competent web developer could make their own Twitter clone and deploy it as a small afternoon project ... does doesn't meet it'll scale to support thousands (or millions) of users.