garykamen / blog

08-24-08

Identi.ca - The Twitter Replacement

FLOSS Weekly had an interesting conversation this week with Evan Prodromou, creator of Open Source Twitter clone Laconica. The idea behind Laconica makes so much sense in light of the continuing downtime problems with Twitter. It basically lets individuals host their own Microblogging service that connects with others’ using the XMPP protocol. What does this mean? If one goes down, the entire community isn’t affected.

Additionally, whereas the Twitter backend was built like a content management system, Laconica was built like a messaging system. The result is significantly less burdensome to the database. A working implementation can be found at identi.ca.