I'm curious as to the point of building a Twitter clone (other than because you can). It seems that Twitter has really captured the market for 140 char messages.
These guys are based at the same co-working station as us, Station-C in Montreal, and they seem to have an idea of what they are doing.
Following the linux model. They install micro-blogging on companies intranets and then do service for them. Not a bad idea, won't be the next google, but it is a niche market that seems ripe for the taking. A lot of companies want to use twitter like services, but are not comfortable going online.
I guess this resembles the case of the social networks out there. There are some general leaders (Facebook, Myspace, Hi5) and some niche leaders (Linkedin and other dozen of niche social networks).
And a bit resembles also with the search engine situation: Google is the leader but that doesn't stop entrepreneurs to build niche search engines or even take on Google directly.
Twitter is the leader, no doubt. But a Twitter clone could have a specific niche (Yammer, for example, is much more oriented to enterprise "twittering").
Laconica just offers you, free, the mean to build such a niche service without being necessary to hire developers. Like there are lots of social networking software...or video sharing software (Youtube clones).
Interesting...I used a Youtube clone software to build a niche video sharing service. Of course, I never hope to reach Youtube mass...and I don't intent to.
Having it available as open source can prove a significant advantage - they might become the Wordpress of microblogging, so to speak.
As for Twitter capturing the microblogging market, with ~6 million users I doubt this is the case. Either what we've seen so far is the tip of the iceberg, or there is very little real demand for microblogging. Twitter seems to be very focused on a certain market and certain set of features, so there's definitely room for other players.
I think the laconi.ca folks could gain a significant share of the market if they indeed would make it possible for their users to have the same username for all identi.ca installations in the world, just as it is possible for wordpress users to comment on every wordpress blog using the same wordpress identity.
A while back, I reasoned on Twitter vs identi.ca. -- Here's the bit on roaming micro-blogging services: http://is.gd/sJtL
I'm not a Twitter devotee personally but if they're right and Twitter keeps growing eventually competition is going to spring up. I mean, imagine a company having a monopoly on e-mail and having to build a system robust enough to handle every e-mail sent worldwide. It wouldn't be possible.
Given that it makes a certain amount of sense to start working on an open source protocol now so that it's mature when/if Twitter competition starts to spring up.
Twitter is a walled garden. Laconi.ca isn't, you can subscribe and respond to users on laconi.ca installations on other domains. It doesn't even have to be running the laconi.ca software, you can communicate with any domain which adheres to the OpenMicroBlogging protocol (there is atleast one other implementation out there).
It is known that companies are, usually, more resistant to the inovation.
I just remember the company I worked for some time ago: they switched from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005 last year :)...
I know a company which builds educational products...yet it doesn't support Firefox! Firefox which has 20% of the market!
Another company just upgraded their Internet Explorer browser...switching from IE6 to IE7...
So, give it some time...the enterprise will catch up eventually with Twitter like stuff. Too bad that, at that time, something new will be out there...and they have to play the cat and mouse again.
I'm baffled that someone would even want to deploy a twitter-like app in a corporate environment. Twitter seems to be the most counter-productive form of communication imaginable, even when you get rid of the character limit.
Twitter is probably more valuable inside an enterprise than on the Internet. It's part of plenty of people's jobs to keep up with a constant stream of minor updates.
The 140 char limit, the inability to attach files, etc... seem very counter-productive with regards to intra-corporate communication. I'd never look toward Twitter for that role. IRC, campfire, Confluence, etc... sure, but never Twitter.
IRC, Campfire, and Confluence all require you to actively participate. (Thanks, I just remembered to hop on ours).
IM is always-on, and at my clients it seems to work. But broadcasting over IM doesn't work.
Email broadcasts piss off enterprise people (not least because psychotic IT managers crack down on email storage, which leads to a startup idea that could easily generate an 8-figure ROI for most large enterprises: kill those IT managers).
IM is always-on, and at my clients it seems to work. But broadcasting over IM doesn't work.
It's the broadcast bit about twitter that worries me. Broadcast equals noise. Communication noise is very harmful.
If you really value real-time updates about your peers then that should at least be limited to the stuff that can be relevant to you, e.g. to people that work on the same project as you.
For this purpose a simple chat-room seems more than adequate. And that is supported by pretty much every IM service in existence. Without character limits. With seamless unicast.
Broadcasts limited to the stuff relevant to you seems like the entire Twitter problem statement. I think you're getting hung up on how Internet Twitter is used. Enterprise IM isn't used for picking up teenaged girls on Yahoo, either.
Broadcasts limited to the stuff relevant to you seems like the entire Twitter problem statement.
Absolutely not. In twitter you follow people, which makes absolutely no sense in corporate context. Who am I supposed to follow, my project manager, all my co-workers? Am I supposed to change my followership for each project? What when I'm jumping between projects?
As I see it the only meaningful messaging context in the corporate world is per-project or per-team. And nothing easier than starting a chatroom, campfire or similar for that. Or why exactly should Bob the programmer care what Sarah from accounting is working on if she's not part of his project or team?
Yes, you follow your teammates (your dev team, your account team, your CSR shift manager), plus management up the chain to the CEO, plus facilities for your building, HR, and finally the hashtags for any project you may be a part of.
I'm not sure I understand the disconnect here. Bob the programmer never sees what Sarah from accounting is working on, because why would Bob want to follow her? I don't see what you're typing on Twitter on the Internet for the same reason.
Presumably, a good part of the opportunity in enterprise Twitter is in figuring out what the features are that helps mainstream users stay subscribed to the right feeds.
Yes, you follow your teammates (your dev team, your account team, your CSR shift manager), plus management up the chain to the CEO, plus facilities for y
our building, HR, and finally the hashtags for any project you may be a part of.
Which is completely nonsensical. Why put that burden on the user when a simple chatroom serves the exact same purpose, with better scoping? Why would I want my CEOs messages intermixed with my project related chatter?
Why should I receive messages for projects that I have nothing to do with only because one of my co-workers is involved with them?
You'll probably say "then filter by hashtag". And I'll tell you: This is why many people consider twitter nothing more than a very poor re-implementation of existing chat technology. The hashtag emulates a chatroom (poorly) on top of a broadcast protocol. In fact the whole construct is so primitive and backwards than one has to wonder whether the twitter guys had ever looked at IRC, jabber or, well, anything, before they started their broken impl.
What they did successfully was to make person-centric scopes (rooms) the default. This obviously has a lot of mass appeal due to the inherent psychological effects (cf. "why babies cry"). But again, I don't see how this has a place in any productive environment.
Twitter isn't a chat system, even if people abuse it that way. If you want to continue casting the argument in terms of why Twitter is worse at group chat than IRC, I'll continue conceding that you're right about group chat and totally missing the point about Twitter. There is a difference between a status update (which people already organize their days around in big companies) and a chat message.
Twitter isn't a chat system, even if people abuse it that way.
Interesting level of abuse then. Those hash-tags seem to be mighty popular, probably only topped by "replies".
There is a difference between a status update (which people already organize their days around in big companies) and a chat message.
And what would that be?
Twitter presents your "status updates" in exactly the same way that chat clients present their chat messages. Okay it's crippled as in you are not supposed to reply - but people are obviously not using it that way.
Furthermore you ignore the fact that nobody in your company has only a single, canonical status that could be summed up in 140 chars. Everybody is involved in multiple projects and teams, each of which has a different status.
There is a reason why all ticket- and project-management systems are project centric and not people centric. It's because the former makes sense and the latter doesn't.
>> "IRC, Campfire, and Confluence all require you to actively participate."
Please. Most of IRC is idlers. It's simple enough to setup an IRC client to be connected to channels that are useful to you.
Twitter is a single dimensional thing. You can only follow people and be followed. With chatrooms you can have several groups open at the same time. I'd say that makes it far more useful, especially in a corporate setting.
With Twitter you just don't have the granularity. You have to either say you're interested in Bob, or you're not interested in Bob. With IRC/chatrooms/etc, you say you're interested in Bob IF he's also talking about some project you've setup a channel for.
I'd say the only real reason for a corporation to use Twitter in their intranet is if they want to appear hip+cool and "get it".
It's simple for people who are used to "idling" on chat channels, periodically checking back to see whether anything interesting has happened. But not only is that an uncommon use case for most corporate computer users, it's annoying even for people who are used to it. To wit: much as I like Campfire, I have to be reminded or scheduled to get on it.
Most people don't spend their days lurking. Almost everyone on the Internet does spend their days available on IM.
You're not acknowledging the Twitter use case. Twitter isn't a chat system, even if people abuse it that way.
"Laconica is built on PHP/MySQL open source software."
Given all the hullabaloo about twiter scaling, rewrites, etc, I thought it would be clear by now that a database driven website is not a good architecture for twitter-like messaging system.
A single instance of Laconica probably won't support millions of users, but the whole point IMO is to federate smaller Laconica sites rather than building a huge centralized monopoly.
Unfortunately, the XMPP feature that is what Laconica should have been based on was only relatively recently specified and implementations are still stabilizing, which is a necessary step before we have clients that support it.
I'm speaking specifically of "PubSub", where you can publish your updates and they get sent out only to subscribers.
Note that twitter does not otherwise match a conventional IM message, nor does it match a conventional conference room. It does precisely match the PubSub use case, and I still hope to see something based on that. Laconica isn't wrong to ignore it, per se, but they will end up having to do (or have already done) a lot of very, very redundant specification as a result of ignoring it. (I'd think they'd still have been better off taking an existing XMPP server, fixing the pubsub to do what they want, and building from there.)
You know, SMTP supports instant messages: SEND FROM: in place of MAIL FROM:. Apparently an analogous facility (I forget if it was actually connected to SMTP) was one of the major reasons for the uptake of Emacs on Multics.
Yeah, I think Twitter is subsidizing the SMS (text messages) sent to the mobile phones...I read somewhere that they stopped to do this in China or another asian country because it was just too expensive...
What is the differentiator here?