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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!"
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--
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 ;-)
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
Essays, papers, articles and blog posts are all the same thing. The only exception is that a blog post is tied to a specific medium. Think about it - everything you say about blog posts can just as easily apply to the others.
The same works in reverse. The good qualities of essays can apply to the others as well:
A blog post is just the modern-day essay. On average, the quality of blog posts may be dire, but that's because a) more people are in a position to spend their time writing, b) more people are inclined to do so, and c) all are available a click away rather than the cream of the crop being reproduced in libraries or wherever. That's one hell of a selection bias.
Twitter is intrinsically different. It's limited to one or two sentences. It's only useful for throwing out a single thought. You can't elaborate. You can't form an argument. You can't support an argument with evidence. It's superficial by its very nature.
But does this really matter? Twitter isn't designed to replace blog posts, or articles, or papers, or essays. It isn't used for that purpose. It's a way of just throwing out a single nugget of information. Can that information be trivial and useless, for instance, "taking a dump, BRB"? Sure. Can it be useful, for instance letting people know about a service update? Sure.
Twitter isn't useless, and it isn't part of a trend. Overhyped, yes. Often used for stupid things, yes. But the link between Twitter and more serious communication is tenuous at best. The difference between Twitter and blog posts is like the difference between leaning over to another desk and mentioning something to a colleague compared with sending a company-wide memo. They are simply different things.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Not really. They have varying levels of formality, and the expectations and effort *generally* differs dramatically between them.
Of course there are those who abuse the terminology, but I do think it's a pretty clean differentiation between them.
And a lot of people are seeing Twitter as the replacement for blogging.
Never is such a strong word. A lot of times the comments are more interesting than TFA, but when pictures or a video are required, or the subject is something damn cool - like that 3D display or advanced prosthetic limbs - then it's sometimes worth skimming the article.
It's amazing how easily massive offtopic conversations appear near the top of articles though. Even worse, I usually want to finish reading the offtopic discussion and sometimes just don't get to the actual on-topic discussion..
which is totally what she said