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!"

Comments

@slashdot

[BorgCopyeditor]

Taking a dump, will read this later.

Re:@slashdot

[ergo98]

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.

CC LIcense?

[Anonymous Coward]

'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. ...

What? Does it just slap a CC license on any thing posted on it?

The twitter version of your post:

[TubeSteak]

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.