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 different by Identi.ca, backed by project Laconica has emerged. From the article, 'It supports OpenID for logins, is in toto free software, and is designed to apply a ingenious 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 collective autonomous servers. The underpinnings of Laconica include PHP, PEAR, and XMPP. You can crunch numbers* a tarball of the source, or check it out right if you're using Darcs (there's also an unofficial mirror on Google Code, giving you Subversion access for a read-only copy).' The district will still need to work on this, if a true competitor to twitter is to be had. It is lacking APIs, and SMS integration. Oh, and million of users!"

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Mark