Twitter with all it’s bells and whistles should be pretty hard to duplicate right? Actually yes! It is! But for you it won’t be as difficult as you think. Here’s why. There’s a fantastic open source project called Status.net, which is an open source microblogging system. Yes that’s right, an Open Source Twitter alternative. Status.net is built in PHP5 and MySQL5 and runs best on a LAMP server.
Why Would I Want This?
So you can build your own Twitter with Status.net. Why would you want this? Let’s take a look at a few reasons why you might need something like this.
- Focus on a particular group or topic
- Self-hosted and in your own domain
- Private communication from the outside world
- Integrate with your existing online community
- Promote your own brand and web presence
Main Features of the Status.net App
I’ve installed this app over at csagum.com/statusnet to test it out. Feel free to create yourself a user and test it out yourself. This app is phenomenal to say the least. It is one of the most “flushed” out and detailed open source applications that I have ever seen in such an early development stage. Here are the features that I noted that were impressive to me:
- Integration with Twitter
- Integration with Facebook
- OpenID support
- RSS support
- A cool Avatar tool for user profiles
- Groups – users can gather together in groups
- Public Timeline just like Twitter’s homepage
- Recent Tags so that you can search what’s being discussed
- Most Popular so you can see what updates are the most popular amongst the community
- SMS tool so you can receive messages from your Cell-Phone
- Email invitation tool to invite friends
- Users can control what Shorten URL service their updates use
- Profile design. Just like Twitter where you can change theme colors and add background images
- Control email updates. Like receive an email every time a new person follows you.
- An option where you can Auto subscribe to every user who subscribes to you!
- YouTube Videos are displayed in a popup javascript window within the site. Pretty cool!!!
- Sync your friends with your Twitter Friends
Getting Status.net Up & Running On Your Webserver
I set Status.net up at csagum.com/statusnet which is on my Dreamhost server account. All I did was create the database in my Dreamhost control panel. Then I uploaded all the files to a folder on my Dreamhost server. Then I renamed the htaccess.sample file to .htacess. After that I went to the location of where I uploaded the files and then /install.php to run the installation wizard.
From there everything went perfect. I was actually surprised that Dreamhost was already configured with all the various PHP extensions that are needed to get Status.net running.
What do you think of this open source application? Do you like it? What kind of microblog service are you going to build?
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Installing your own Identi.ca is tempting, and simply having the possibility is enormously important, but for now I stick to the original service. Why? Because nobody would know to look for me elsewhere. I have a couple of followers who run their own Status.net servers, and *they* had to find *me*; it would never have happened the other way around.
Felix you are right when it comes to Marketing. But what about collaboration?
Twitter solves the problem when it comes to marketing, but not when it comes to getting groups of people together collaborating around a project or problem.
Once posting to groups from different instances is worked out, I imagine it’ll be easier to find people who you might be interesting, merely by gravitating towards popular groups.
Felix has a very good and important point. We absolutely need a search engine which will let us find all accounts on all of the OMB-network. Finding all content on all of OMB would be great too, but first and foremost people search.
Well, for sure you are right about the scripts. Very easy to use, lot’s of features. I think it will grow very large and become very popular. I have installed and just playing now to learn all the features;but it’s great.
I was going to ask how you got remote subscription working on an install on Dreamhost, but apparently the answer is: you didn’t. There are a number of features that Dreamhost won’t allow, even if you compile your own PHP. I still haven’t found a way to have a federated microblog on Dreamhost. While I recommend Status.net, and I recommend Dreamhost, I can’t recommend Dreamhost as a place to host a Status.net installation.