Slashdot Mirror
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? 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 themselves that the resulting din is a result of the platform's success.
Where once people penned carefully authored essays, they then started writing papers. That was too much effort, so they started making articles. Articles were too much trouble so poorly researched, error-filled, rashly composed blog posts became the new norm.
That was too much hassle so now people just puke everything they think on Twitter.
Twitter is a service, and remarkably few care whether it is "open source" or not (though they do care that it is purportedly terribly unreliable). Oooh, but this one is designed to apply a Creative Commons license to people's finger spews? Come on.
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
Recently I've seen a lot of posts bitching and moaning about /. user twitter.
http://web.sourceforge.com/terms-use
Please report any violations of the Terms (except for claims of intellectual property infringement) to the SourceForge Site Director at admin@corp.sourceforge.com.
If (s)he isn't violating the TOS, then just STFU & let it go.
Otherwise, report the user and let the admins make up their mind.
Complaining about it has obviously not caused Taco or the other Overlords to muzzle twitter.
More importantly, karma works, twitter posts at 0 or -1, as do the sock puppet accounts.
This is all offtopic, but it keeps coming up... And its funny:
I don't see/notice twitter's posts, but I can't get away from the complaints about 'em.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.