Open Source Microblogging

Evan Prodromou

Control Yourself, Inc.

6 Thermidor CCXIV

What to expect

Rambling tangents

Inside jokes

Disjointed thoughts

Bad puns

Sly insinuations

Wild-eyed enthusiasm

About me

Longtime writer and programmer from San Francisco

Moved to Montreal in 2002

I Freedom

Stubborn as hell

Not really 100% all there

Dumb sense of humour

Ideas I've had

bearfight.com

Wikiclock

OpenID for MediaWiki

certifi.ca

vinismo.com

Burn All GIFs

JokeML

Ideas I've had, part two

Spock Mountain Research Labs

iDog

DeCSS

JOAP

kei.ki

Wikitravel

Identi.ca

I can't tell the difference

I probably have mental problems

I don't know what makes some of these things insanely popular and others not

You might want to take the rest of this discussion with a grain of salt

Being crazy gets you to cool parties

Invited to a minisummit at FSF in March 2008

Folks from OKF, FSF, CC, SFLC

I was in Buenos Aires at the time

Lucky me!

Discussed the problem of Freedom and Network services

Web 2.0 Open

You can use it. Usually.

You can write software that uses the API.

Rounded corners.

Look! A cute whale! Awwwww!

What problem?

We're supposed to have freedom

Four freedoms: use, study and adapt, distribute, improve

I count five.

Using software on someone else's computer makes these freedoms hard.

We know how to fix that

Free Software.

Duh.

What problem? Page 2

Data is the Intel inside - TO'R

Open Source licenses are irrelevant

Terms of service

Privacy

Sociality

Social Web

Your freedom, my freedom

We've told ourselves it doesn't matter

Deep stacks

Intertwingly

What is the point?

autonomy

What is to be done?

Agreed to become a ragtag band of superheroes fighting for autonomy

autonomo.us blog and wiki

autono.my was 10x more expensive

Franklin Street Statement

Open Software Service Definition

http://opendefinition.org/ossd

Data is Open Data.

But personal stuff is yours to manage.

Software is Free Software.

Code must be shared.

Open formats.

Open APIs.

Franklin Street Statement

This matters.

Developers should make software for Free services.

Service providers should use it.

Users should hold them to it.

http://autonomo.us/2008/07/franklin-street-statement/

Now, back to me

What was I gonna do to make this happen?

Twitter. Duh.

Very popular.

Web 2.0 open.

Beloved by Web people.

I used it all the time.

Seemed pretty easy to implement.

Losing its edge.

Ripe for conquest.

What is Microblogging?

Posting itty-bitty status messages.

They go out to your friends and fans.

You read your friends' messages.

Yay.

But also

Multiple channels

SMS

IM

RSS

API + clients

What is Microblogging? part two

Universal teeny-weeny message router

Multicast, moved up about 3 layers on the stack, and made to work.

Why does it matter?

It's really addictive

Smooths over rough edges of communication

Most meaningful social network

So I got cracking

PHP + MySQL

Commodity hosting

DB_DataObject

XMPPHP

XMLWriter

RDF

Semantic Web

Open standard(s) for meaning

Easy as hell to implement

Easy to create data for

Lowers the barrier for writing smart software

Make Free Software more relevant and user autonomy more realizable

The name

CIRA is awesome

Stoi.ca

Laconi.ca

Identi.ca

Realistic Autonomy

How to move to a new server and still keep your friends and followers?

Start a new server and keep the network

Autonomy requires federated microblogging.

OpenMicroBlogging

http://openmicroblogging.org/

OAuth-based

Subscriptions

Posting notices (including rich media)

Sharing profile

The Social Web Should Work Like the Document Web

Distributed

Open standards

Easy linking

Ubiquitous

Multiple implementations

Identity -- OpenID

Releasing the code

Started mid-May at RCC

Beta release in June

autonomo.us people

Friends in Montreal tech community

No public links

Worked out some kinks

Launching

July 2, 2008

Twitter goes down

Send out an email to launch

CC, RWW, TechCrunch, Slashdot, Mashable, Winer

10K users in 36 hours

Hosed

Not enough servers

DNS not ready to move

PHP bug made Jabber not work

Features missing

Replies

User search

Clients

Mobile

We got those going

What's next?

AIM

Better federation

XMPP-PubSub

UI tweaks (delete, edit, hide replies)

Track

Easy moving from server to server

Twitter interop

Multiple licenses

Pownce-like multimedia

I18n

Will this work?

Identi.ca is a business.

Open Source is disruptive.

Shifts the value proposition from features to relationships.

Burns out the underbrush.

See: wordpress.com, livejournal.com, Wikia

What can you do?

Use Identi.ca

Invite your friends

Write code

Help with translations

Link to us

Make themes

Make new OSSD-compliant services

What needs doing

Calendaring

Email

Social bookmarks

Social news

Storage

Photo sharing

Video sharing

What needs doing, pt. 2

Mapping

Web search

Homepage

Cloud computing

Distributed commenting

Social networking... maybe.

Other utopian beliefs I espouse

Esperanto

Sona

French Revolutionary Calendar

Stopping at crosswalks

Burning Man

Ecotopia and car-free cities

Do you have to share my tinfoil hat beliefs?

No. But if you share some, you should help out.

I Twitter Quitters.

Dual-post if you must.

Moving now will earn my thanks and appreciation.

You may dislike Twitter's reliability.

You may just want to be on the winning side.

This is Web 3.0.

Just in case you were wondering why you were excited about it.

Tonight

Free Network Services BOF

Open Microblogging BOF

Questions?