identi.ca/laconi.ca - independence day

Posted on | July 4, 2008 |

the net is buzzing on identi.ca, a twitter-esque microblogging-service launched by Evan Prodromou a few days ago. as of today, identi.ca lacks many key-features Twitter has (SMS-gateway, API) or used to have (track). but criticizing identi.ca’s need to catch up is missing the point, as it’s not competing with Twitter on the level of features (yet), but rather on the underlying principles of message-transportation: identi.ca is based on laconi.ca, an opensource implementation of the OpenMicroBlogging-spec, which basically means - everbody can install his very own instance of laconi.ca/identi.ca on their own servers! the OpenMicroBlogging-spec is the glue that sticks those independent instances of laconi.ca together, enabling subscriptions (aka following) & postings across various systems. in a nutshull, a distributed network of laconi.ca’s promises independence from the fail-whale…

how does this work out for the user? lets assume you’re using microblogging-platform A and want to follow someone at platform B. you find that someone’s profile on platform B and click “subscribe”. remember, you have no account on B, so you’re now asked to enter your user-ID from platform A, which contains the URL of A plus your username, something like http://platform-a.com/username.

here’s a screenshot of this “remote subscription” on identi.ca:

you’re than redirected to platform A, to confirm the subscription. from then on, messages this user leaves on B will get transported to your account on A. anybody who has used OpenID or OAuth will feel familiar with the process, for others it might sound a bit complicated at first (honestly, it took me few minutes to grok it, esp. since all the laconi.ca servers popping up are using the same template ).

speaking of, you can try out my instance of laconi.ca at http://laconica.kamleitner.com, or build your own using the code from laconi.ca. 0xdecafbad has put together an excellent walk-through which should guide you through installation. just one more thing to add: if you’re using PHP < 5.2.1you’ll have to add your own sys-get-temp-dir()-function - check http://php.m-otion.at/manual/en/function.sys-get-temp-dir.php.

other places to get info on laconi.ca include a thread at scripting.com and irc://irc.freenode.org/#laconica. finally, here’s a list of instances running laconi.ca…

thx to Evan, happy independence day!

update #1: here’s a rather chilled post on TechCrunch

update #2: btw., cross-transport of messages between identi.ca and my own instance seems to work, altough I get loads of old messages from identi.ca, probably some stuck message-queue there…

 

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