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Burned by Twitter, Developers Launch Distributed Microblogging Service
- shuri 16y agoThe question is how can you get UberMedia on board.
- benwerd 16y agoThis is a great thing. Status.net is an awesome project, and Evan is brilliant - but having a bunch of inter-operable services and projects just makes OStatus that much more useful. I can't wait for more. I hope everyone's creating machine images for these projects. It should take two minutes to start your own microblogging site - ideally with as little technical involvement as possible.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- tomkarlo 16y agoSounds great, looks great, but actually trying to sign up with a new account using email address (because using my Twitter or Facebook login on this seems well, kind of inappropriate) returns "Internal Server Error". Fail.
- rsoto 16y agoWhat's up with the downvotes? I also feel like the best option to sign up to a twitter's competitor service is by NOT using twitter. The signup button goes to a "Internal Server Error" as described above. He wasn't bashing anyone.
- Vivtek 16y agoI think it's the concluding "Fail". It's a bit over the top in terms of tone.
- tomkarlo 16y agoAs much as I'm sympathetic to a small team getting a spike in traffic, I stand by that comment... It's a pretty big "fail" when a huge rush of users trying to register results in... nobody being able to register. At the very least they could have been capturing the emails for later follow-up. How many of those people will remember to come back later and sign up again?
- ddagradi 16y agoWe're aware of the email issue, and we're working to fix it. Please keep in mind that this is an alpha release from a small team in a little under two weeks, and there's a long way to go.
- wyclif 16y agoSame here. Server error upon using the email link.
- ddagradi 16y agoAnd actually - this is because our Heroku sendgrid add-on ran out of emails so....herp derp. It's being taken care of; I'm not sure anyone imagined as much attention as it's gotten today.
- petervandijck 16y ago"In order to follow someone from Identi.ca, just paste the ATOM feed from their profile into rStat.us." That's when it all falls down, of course. And you can't follow people on Twitter?
- generalk 16y agoI can see this being replaced with something automated. As it stands it smacks of "hacker put a text input field to test functionality and it works." I mean, worst-case, they could screenscrape the user's page and pull the Atom URL that way.
- ddagradi 16y agoIt's only an initial implementation. If you can't follow users between sites with a single click in the final version, we've failed.
- petervandijck 16y agoCool, looking forward to more iterations. Congrats on the launch!
- jmathai 16y agoUnfortunately, the only people who care about Twitter's recent actions are the nerds. At this point Twitter has too much momentum for the nerds to have much (if any) influence. Building "open" technology isn't an effective method of social engineering here. I wish I knew a better alternative but I don't. That being said, I never understood why everyone (including pg) referred to Twitter as this great new protocol. It's 100% proprietary and this type of decision should have been easily predicted. SMTP and POP are protocols, Twitter and Facebook are websites with APIs. But good for the developers. The seem passionate about the idea and are building it. Kudos.
- pumpmylemma 16y agoI agree with your tone, but disagree with the conclusions. Unfortunately, the only people who care about Twitter's recent actions are the nerds. ... SMTP and POP are protocols, Twitter and Facebook are websites with APIs. A protocol is literally a standard or convention for communicating. In the case of twitter and facebook, the tools they provide for declaring social networks enables (arguably new) forms of social communication. Comparatively, SMTP, POP, HTTP, etc didn't require social scaffolding, or at least, it was not the central element. Without the social scaffolding, twitter and Facebook are useless; without social scaffolding, SMTP and POP still let me communicate with friends I already know. (That being said, I would have preferred that Twitter was a distributed and open protocol from the start; however, I'm not going to switch to an open product just because it's open. I want the more accessible and wider cast social network.)
- kirubakaran 16y agoWhat about Twitter's actions that are yet to come? And why not just try? What if the open platform succeeds? Even if the chance of success is 0.01%, it is worth trying. Also, a million such attempts by million such teams can fail. Only one team needs to succeed. Once.
- peteforde 16y agoOn Hacker News, we don't downvote someone just because we can't find the right words to describe how radically we disagree. There really are two types of people in the world: lottery players and everyone else.
- mindstab 16y agoDidn't this already happen, and last time we got identi.ca? Why spin off a new microblogging site when there already is one rebel site full of open source devs? What does rStat.us get us that identi.ca didn't?
- BenSS 16y agoPrecisely what I was going to post. Both Identi.ca and rStat.us need a compelling reason to switch. Either doing twitter better, or something you can't do on twitter. 'Because Twitter is mean' doesn't pull many users.
- drinian 16y agoAs mentioned in the article, all of these services use the OStatus protocol for interoperability. It's pretty great stuff -- I have a StatusNet instance on my website, and people can follow me from other StatusNet instances, I can follow them; it really is decentralized Twitter.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ddagradi 16y agoOur goal is not to compete with identi.ca, but join them in promoting OStatus as an open alternative to Twitter that encourages a thriving developer community to build new and exciting apps and services without fear.
- eoghan 16y agoMeanwhile on Twitter... http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23stoprightthere http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23stoprightthere None of these people care, I'm afraid.
- w1ntermute 16y agoPeople are going to be a lot more hesistant about this after the Diaspora fiasco.
- JoelMcCracken 16y agoOf course, Klabnik was one of the main dudes who brought this to the community's attention. Not that this would be well known, exactly, but it was enough for this mention: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned-from-the-diaspora-launch/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/09/22/security-lessons-learned...
- andresmh 16y agois it officially a fiasco?
- ddagradi 16y agoI'd call it a -gate
- SkyMarshal 16y agoTrying to register using email gives "Internal Server Error". (I prefer to register for sites using my email address, and then link to my FB and Twitter accounts. In case I ever decide to delete either of the latter, other services like rstat.us won't be affected.)
- ddagradi 16y agoWe have at ticket out that involves better account management that's going to get addressed this weekend at the latest. Being able to add and remove services easily is a priority: https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues#issue/44 https://github.com/hotsh/rstat.us/issues#issue/44 (See other comment re: email)
- andresmh 16y agowritten in Ruby to attract more developers than identi.ca that is written in PHP... really?
- OSButler 16y agoThat line irked me too. I don't believe anyone would take offence about the underlying technology, if the product is of excellent quality. The OP might want to add some more explanation to that point, as it seems more like the usual php bashing than being based on substantial data to validate that point.
- MatthewPhillips 16y agoI took it to mean that there are some languages that certain developers won't touch, and php is one of those and ruby isn't. Can't we agree on that?
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- anon114 16y agoP2P twitter is absolutely necessary but it has to be done right. First of all, ensure privacy with public key cryptography. Sign tweets for authenticity. Retweets can just be additional signatures. If a distributed microblogging protocol was interoperable with twitter and user friendly, it would probably be able to siphon people off of twitter proper. Certainly it would be an attractive alternative to anyone who NEEDED the service, and that's the important thing, right? Hopefully work out a way so that tweets on twitter.com can be captured and distributed in this P2P network. These tweets could be unsigned since if you include a link to the original tweet they can be verified. Defining protocols instead of providing services democratizes a layer of the OSI model. We need to think deeper than that, though. We need to democratize the physical layer as well. Luckily we've proven that you don't need a high bandwidth link to be useful in a crisis situation. Twitter will do. To that end, I suggest that this project make an even more lofty goal: Create a small embedded device interoperable with this P2P microblogging network. The device can communicate with peers over a Software Defined Radio. The device should be capable of bridging to a wi-fi or 3g network. This would accomplish the democratization of the physical layer which is so important to combat censorship and oppression. You can't monetize democracy. This is why these projects will only happen on a volunteer/charity basis.
- cabalamat 16y ago> The device can communicate with peers over a Software Defined Radio. For extra points, allows several such devices within range of each other to automatically create an ad hoc mesh network.
- dfj225 16y agoI agree with you in principle, but I don't ever see something like this becoming mainstream, even if it does interoperate with Twitter and is as easy to use as Twitter. Simply put, there will be no selling point. Switching would give the user the same capability of subscribing to short messages from other people as they already have on Twitter. So, why switch? Even if they can continue to follow everyone they already follow, what's the incentive aside from technology they don't understand anyway?
- im_dario 16y ago
- dmoney 16y agoLots of people have thought of writing "twitter but open". Congrats on actually doing it. When I was kicking around the idea but never acting on it, one thing that occurred to me was that, in order to make it really take off, you have to create some way that everybody already has it. Some way to follow and be followed by twitter users, for example, or a way to make it so that your e-mail address is your microblog address. Just my two cents.
- marcamillion 16y agoI hate to say it...but like Diaspora, I expect this to come out with a bang and slowly peter out and die. It's not because Twitter's technology is any more superior. It's the simple thing called 'network effects'. Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, I think Twitter is too far along for their momentum to be stopped. Valiant attempt, and kudos to the developer(s) for actually getting it launched - but this is definitely like spitting in the wind....imho of course.
- cabalamat 16y ago> It's not because Twitter's technology is any more superior. It's the simple thing called 'network effects'. I agree, and the solution must be to provide a service that is useful even when not many people are using it. For example, could an rstat.us account be set up so that everything published on it is automatically republished on the user's Twitter and facebook accounts, and any replies from those places published back to rstat.us?
- Hawramani 16y agoThis is a great idea! (So long as Twitter doesn't block it)
- recoiledsnake 16y agoThat will make the incentive for Twitter users to get rstat.us accounts a round zero. Exactly what Buzz tried, remember how badly that failed?
- _frog 16y agoIt already posts updates to your twitter feed if you sign in with that account and I've heard they'll be adding that feature to standard accounts soon.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoYup, at this point you can't get people to move away from twitter just by providing a nearly identical service. Because the network effect makes them no longer identical. You need to add a way for people to either proxy through the competition (e.g. parallels on a Macbook, skype integrating with the existing phone system, etc.) or you need a featureset that is so superior enough people will switch anyway to catalyze a larger migration.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoTwitter is not "microblogging", thinking of it that way will only cause you to misunderstand twitter and come to incorrect conclusions. Twitter is closer to facebook and IRC than it is to blogging.
- jmreid 16y agoThat's your opinion. It's too generic of a service for it to be used in one way.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoIt's not identical to facebook or IRC either, that's my point as well. It's a new sort of thing that requires careful thought to properly understand, applying inaccurate labels doesn't help.
- ABFrep 16y agoIt's clear what twitter is: it's a website, it's a SMS service for phones, messaging, service, etc. There is plenty of vertical development that can be done by third parties, no need to focus on creating your own client. In programming, twitter is like the IE mini-browser control you can drop into a window and create your own 'custom' browser. Clients like that aren't needed. Instead use the data in a new way, or provide a new data stream by tracking something in real life.
- TheSwede75 16y agoI agree 100%, twitter is 'SMS for the web' and NOTHING else! 140 character limit should be enough to make this point.
- benatkin 16y agoHas anyone managed to subscribe to an rstat.us feed from identi.ca?
- TheSwede75 16y agoI LOVE the fact that you can 'login with twitter' to rstat :-)
- TheSwede75 16y agoInternal server error when trying to sign-up.
- ddagradi 16y agoThere's an email issue we're aware of. Twitter and Facebook logins are working correctly.
- TheSwede75 16y agoThx, I did notice. Testing out with twitter login :-)
- bergie 16y agoI wish there was a OStatus implementation to a Jaiku-like service (see for instance http://qaiku.com http://qaiku.com ) The threaded microblogging model supports far deeper interaction than the way Twitter works.
- elrodeo 16y agohttp://identi.ca/group http://identi.ca/group
- pathik 16y agoThe next Diaspora. Doomed to fail.
- Tichy 16y agoI recently had this thought that even with a distributed system, probably some centralized monopoly would emerge - the search engine, like Google for the web. Following people works OK in a distributed way, but search and analytics would be a problem. Unless an efficient distributed search engine can be built, too.
- elrodeo 16y agoI'd suggest that all people who want to try out rstat.us post something with hash tag #hackernews, such that we can connect there.
- dclaysmith 16y agoI think that it is possible (tho unlikely) for an alternative to Twitter to emerge but it would require: 1) All clients start implementing the "open" protocol next to the Twitter. So send each message twice. 2) Someone takes the Twitter firehose and screws it into the "open" protocol. You would have a bit of noise but you would then have a legitimate choice: "open" or twitter. If the number of people using the "open" alternative/protocol achieved critical mass you would have something. Maybe this is why Twitter is clamping down on clients. Undermining the popularity of clients prevents the first item. And Twitter would never allow anyone to use the firehose for this purpose. So, pretty unlikely.
- markkat 16y agoI think they should consult some people with strong experience in marketing in order to present this in the most concise and approachable manner as possible. Their biggest hurdle is going to be apathy due to a lack of comprehension. The more noob-friendly rstat.us is, the better their chances. They've actually done much better than most, but it really can't be dumbed down enough. There should be a clear barrier between text for developers, and text for everyone else. I really wish them luck. It's a noble effort.
- ddagradi 16y agoWe've got some great designers ready to help us simplify the experience and provide a clearer and more comprehensible message. It can't be stressed enough how important great design is to a project like this, and I'm looking forward to crafting a truly elegant experience.
- markkat 16y agoCool! I'm looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with. Like I said, what you have gives the impression that it's on your mind. The underlying concept is actually a pretty heady idea to non-tech folk. It might not hurt to get a bunch of them and bounce things off of them until you see their light bulb turn on. Best of luck!
- rch 16y agoStrange to see a reference to couchdb/couchbase so awkwardly shoehorned into the article.
- modernerd 16y agoDistributed microblogging: connecting the masses by making them further apart. Great to see OStatus gaining traction. Is there space in the OStatus spec for an email-like username/service format? I'd like to be able to add someone on identi.ca by typing theirhandle@identi.ca, for example, rather than having to copy and paste a link to their atom feed. Or would that be too confusing? If so, is there a more user-friendly alternative?
- jamesll 16y agoThis is an additional spec used by statusnet called webfinger. we're working with the OStatus folks and should have support soon.
- ajays 16y agoIf I could draw an analogy: Twitter is like AIM. Can we put together an open service, like XMPP, which interfaces to TWitter, but is distributed and free?