Twitter, for the Enterprise

Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting (and @pistachio on twitter) has published a report covering 19 “Enterprise Microsharing” applications, including a number of open source applications:

• Identi.ca (The report refers consistently to Identica, not Laconi.ca – I know Evan’s mentioned simplifying things by renaming the Laconi.ca software to match the site name, but for now the software still lives at the Laconi.ca url)
• Jisko
• OpenMicroBlogger
• Yonkly (which doesn’t mention open source on the site, but does exist as a GPL v2 project at codeplex. Site runs ads for a SaaS version.)

As well as Prologue, which does not get grouped in with the other open source options though it is available under GPL v2. (It gets a separate group as it isn’t purely a microsharing application btu a theme for WordPress.)

It’s a good overview, though I would have liked to have seen more coverage of the difference that the OpenMicroblogging protocol (which is supported not just by OpenMicroBlogger but also by Laconi.ca) will make, in terms of real interoperability across networks. But I guess that would be less relevant to the Enterprise scenario, since the whole purpose of the enterprise scenario is to have a closed network.

(See also my post from earlier this summer listing open source microblogging options, as well as this recent post suggesting Twitter themselves could get on the open microblogging bus.)

Open Web Foundation is to Autonomo.us as OSI is to FSF?

This morning David Recordon formally announced the Open Web Foundation in a morning keynote at OSCON. (The shorter url openweb.org will come at somepoint).

The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page:

Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

The foundation is trying to break the trend of creating separate foundations for each specification, coming out of the realization that we could come together and generalize our efforts. The details regarding membership, governance, sponsorship, and intellectual property rights will be posted for public review and feedback in the following weeks.

This is wonderful, and it is great to see the large number of significant companies and well known advocates for open source which are part of the foundation and it’s efforts.

But I worry about two specific things.

Read more…

Identi.ca Action Stream Plugin

Identi.ca is a new micro-blogging service which runs the open source Laconica platform.

Ultimately, this will likely be the distributed, open microblogging platform twitter fans have been waiting for (though the community itself seems mostly to be sticking with Twitter, fail whale and all).

For now, it’s just fun to play around with.

I just releases an Identi.ca action stream plugin – get version 1.0 on my Movable Type Action Streams Plugins page.

Here’s what the output looks like: