Does the world need more than one Twitter? How about 10,000 of them? That is how many sites are running on the hosted version of StatusNet, which went into private beta at our Realtime CrunchUp last November. Today, StatusNet is opening up its hosted service to all comers in a public beta.
You can think about StatusNet as the WordPress of microblogging. StatusNet is open-source software which can either be downloaded and run on your own enterprise servers or now on StatusNet’s hosted servers. Basic service is free, with plans to charge for premium levels down the line. The premium versions will be ad-free, support unlimited users, larger file sizes, your own domain and design, Facebook and Twitter integration, and XMPP feeds. → Read More
Montreal-based StatusNet, the company behind the open-source microblogging service identi.ca, is closing an $875,000 seed round today. Investors include Montreal Startup, iNovia Capital, Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Xavier Niel. The startup, which changed its name a few weeks ago from Control Yourself, raised a previous seed round of $150,000 from Montreal Startup in January, 2009.
StatusNet wants to become the WordPress of microblogging. It created an open-source microblogging software platform (formerly called laconi.ca, now called status.net) which anyone can download and run on their own servers. Now, it is working on a hosted version of Status.net, currently in private beta. (We have 50 invites for anyone who includes the invitation code “TC09″ on the signup page).
The bet here is that just as millions of people run their own blogs, millions of people and companies will want to run their own microblogs as well. Offering a microblogging platform as a hosted service will allow StatusNet to pursue a strategy similar to WordPress.com. It will offer the basic service for free, and then charge power-users for extras. → Read More
One thing we need is better search for microblogging sites like Twitter, Friendfeed and their competitors.
Swedish search engine Twingly is launching just that – a new microblogging search tool – today. Use it to search a variety of sites – Twitter, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Bleeper.de, Bloggy.se and Pownce archives (since the service is now dead). They’re calling it the worlds first federated microblog search.
This is a one stop shop to do searches across multiple microblogging sites at once, not just Twitter or other individual services via their own search products.
Friendfeed integration is “on the way” says CEO Martin Källström. Users can also create keyword alerts accessed via RSS or email. → Read More
Last week, Google announced that the company was unceremoniously discontinuing or at least ceasing development of a number of services it had launched or acquired in the past, including Google Video, Notebook, Catalog Search, Dodgeball and The Mashup Editor. The shutdown of the latter two was announced on the Google Code blog by VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, along with some explanation regarding microblogging Jaiku, which many tech blogs and news outlets reported was merely being kept alive without further plans for the Twitteresque service.
Jaiku founder Jyri Engeström responded to the reports today in a blog post claiming that the service – which has always remained invite-only ever since its launch even after Google’s acquisition in 2007 – is actually going to serve for something more interesting than he set it out to be, and I think he’s got a point. → Read More
Something just happened and I think it may be important. While not everything has been put in place, it appears the necessary ingredients for a conversational platform – correction, open conversational platform – have been added to the mix. What Dave Winer calls the two-party system may be emerging at just the right time to gather tangible momentum. What Winer brought to the formalization of an open standard around RSS is being forged this time in the MicroBlogging or public IM space by a new cast of characters and a push protocol called XMPP. In the early days of RSS, Winer worked with and then carried on after Netscape dropped out, essentially freezing in place those aspects of both systems that he felt were fundamental. Today it is Twitter’s functionality that is being aggressively cloned and perhaps frozen with Evan Prodromou’s Identi.ca. Though the platform started shakily with no directory to aid formation of a user’s follow cloud (or social graph), Twitter’s struggles masked the insurgent’s progress. When Twitter’s Evan Williams announced the Summize acquisition in a conversation with Mike Arrington at Tim O’Reilly’s private FooCamp, the outlines of what Twitter would do to monetize the service began to emerge. Subsequent announcements of a deal with ping server startup Gnip and continued messaging that XMPP would remain quarantined from the larger Twitter development community made it increasingly obvious that Twitter was moving quickly to consolidate ownership of its dominant cloud of users around the Track capability. A kind of registered search where filtered keywords aid in discovering conversations across the public network, Track depends on effective real-time response to enable back and forth “conversations” from point to point and one to many. Twitter’s @Reply functionality allowed anyone to talk directly to users, but the default setting only let these messages through when the sender was being “followed” by the receiver. When Track was working, I could (and did) route around that limitation by evangelizing the dropping of the @sign. People who tracked my username as I did could get through to me at any time with or without the @sign. Although this strategy irritated many users, it also promoted the way I consumed these track messages, via an XMPP stream over the open source Jabber instant messaging transport supported by Google Talk/Chat among others. Ironically, Identi.ca has not gotten around yet to supporting the Twitter @reply functionality. When Loic Le → Read More
The launch of Twitter clone Identi.ca earlier this week caused a bit of a blogstorm because it appears to have a solution to Twitter’s all-too-regular downtime. (That problem has reached comical proportions, with the familiar Twitter Fail Whale now appearing on T-shirts and kitschy art). Identi.ca’s answer to Twitter’s scaling issues is by open-sourcing its code and encouraging others to host Identi.ca on their own servers, thus distributing the load. The service also supports other open standards, such as OpenID and a new one called OpenMicroblogging. Based on OAuth, the OpenMicroblogging standard is aimed at making it easy for people on other messaging services to subscribe to Identi.ca users and vice versa. Identi.ca is the brainchild of Canadian developer Evan Prodromou (a Californian living in Montreal), who explains the thinking behind the project here. He has a lot of good ideas. In particular, we agree that decentralizing Twitter is the key to making it scale better, although there are other ways to do that as well. The service is also based on the idea that you can take your data with you at any time to any other microblogging service. But for now, Identi.ca is only for super-early adopters. It lacks some basic functionality, such as the ability to search for other users to follow or to import your contacts from other services. (I guess you are supposed to e-mail all your friends the link to your Identi.ca profile so that they can subscribe to you or just hope they find your name on the public feed). These problems are easy enough to address, and Identi.ca has along list of features it is working on. The bigger problem with Identi.ca is simply that it is not Twitter. However annoying Twitter’s erratic outages may be, it still has the advantage of having many more users than any other competing service. If everyone is on Twitter, what’s the point of going to Identi.ca? That can change over time, obviously, especially if Twitter does not get its act together. But the inconvenience of switching means that it still has time to fix itself. That does not mean Twitter can afford to ignore the excitement generated by Identi.ca. In fact, it should adopt some of its ideas, like decentralizing its messaging system and making it easy for people to export their friends and data to other services. CrunchBase Information identi.ca Twitter Information provided by → Read More
