You can find that plugin here: Twitter Tools StatusNet (and should be able to find it soon on wordpress.org).

What I hadn’t realized at the time was just how Twitter Tools itself worked, and what that meant about the StatusNet plugin.

Twitter Tools follows all of your tweets, not just those which you enter via WordPress or generate as new blog post notifications. What this means is that using Twitter Tools in combination with the StatusNet plugin, everything you post on Twitter gets also posted to the StatusNet instance you’ve configured.

Everything you post on Twitter, regardless of it’s source: desktop client, SMS, web client, etc.

This means you’ve got to be careful. If you use Identi.ca, for example, and have your Identi.ca account configured to cross post to Twitter (which is a popular option) you’ll create a loop. You post to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, where Twitter Tools finds it and (with my plugin in place) cross posts to Identi.ca, which cross posts to Twitter, and so on (repeat until someone tells you your account has gone crazy).

So, you’ve got to decide which service (Twitter or StatusNet) you intend to actually post to, and which you want automatically fed cross posts.

• Post to Twitter, auto-cross-post to StatusNet. This is what I’ve decided to do. I post to twitter, through all the usual methods, and I let Twitter Tools cross post my tweets to Identi.ca. I have different friends/followers on each, and this way the conversation gets shared.
• Post to StatusNet, auto-cross-post to Twitter. This you can do with existing StatusNet instances, and if you do, be sure NOT to install the StatusNet plugin for Twitter Tools.

Hope some of you find the option useful.

Now that Twitter Tools is at 2.x, Alex has provided an API for enabling additional posting.

So I wrote a plugin for his plugin: Twitter Tools – StatusNet.

It leverages the API he provided to post your tweets (on new blog post creation or via the sidebar form) to a StatusNet instance (default is Identi.ca but it can be easily changed to another). (In case you missed the announcement, the software formerly known as Laconica, which powers Identi.ca but also other sites, is now known as StatusNet).

Given that many StatusNet instances also already cross-post to Twitter, my plugin enables you to suppress the actual posting to Twitter that Twitter Tools does. (You can have notices posted to both Twitter and your StatusNet instance, or just your StatusNet instance without Twitter).

What it doesn’t do is provide all the functionality Twitter Tools provides – digests of your notices, a sidebar widget containing latest notices. If you cross-post to twitter you can use all that functionality from Twitter Tools natively.

If you’d like to replace Twitter throughout Twitter Tools with your favorite StatusNet instance, you can hack away at Alex’s plugin directly – the same basic concepts I outlined before would still apply.

As described in this earlier post, I’ve modified Twitter Tools to use Identi.ca endpoints rather than Twitter ones, since I have my Identi.ca account set to auto-cross-post to Twitter.

Here’s a revised version of what I’m calling Identi.ca tools – just replace the twitter-tools.php from the 1.6 release with this one (rename it from twitter-tools.php.txt to twitter-tools.php of course) and you should be good to go:

twitter-tools.php.txt

So, Ubuntu has a pretty famous Bug #1:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1
The title is “Microsoft has a majority market share”. I think it’s a great part of the Ubuntu culture, because it focuses people on what they want to do with Ubuntu.

Our bug #1, by the way, is “/doc/contact”.
http://laconi.ca/trac/ticket/1
Since this was long-ago fixed, I’d like to wipe this ticket* and replace it with an overall project purpose, like Ubuntu’s. But what would the bug be?

It got me thinking – and not just about Identi.ca and open microblogging as a federated, distributed alternative to centralized approaches like Twitter.

Moose and Squirrel - photo by Paul Lannuier.

Remember Boris and Natasha, and their plans for world domination? They ultimately failed because they always decided "but first, get moose and squirrel" – they chose the wrong bug #1. (See 21 Things I Wish My Broker Had Told Me).

At its core, having a bug #1 is really a geek-centric way of having a mission statement. What’s wrong with the world as it exists without your effort, and what would it look like to solve that problem?

This could even be adapted to personal goals – you could have a shortlist of “bugs” with the world you hope to focus on, and while you may not ever close each of those bugs, you should be able to tell whether your work is headed in the right direction – whether you feel like you are contributing to progress in that direction or not.

One concern might be that phrasing each goal as a bug limits innovation – the old FUD that open source imitates, but doesn’t innovate, for example – but describing a broad problem you hope to solve doesn’t, in reality, limit the innovation you might create.

Side note: it’s really interesting to read the threads associated with Ubuntu’s bug #1 and Evan’s question (view by thread in laconica-dev archives) – both are core cases of a “reflexive public” in the process of defining itself (see Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software for more on that concept).

Alex King‘s Twitter Tools is a great little WordPress plugin for integrating your Twitter presence with your blog. It can show your latest tweets in a sidebar widget, create a “digest” post daily / weekly with a list of your tweets, and announce your blog posts to your twitter account.

In this post I’ll show you what changes are necessary to make it work with identi.ca instead of Twitter.

Why would you want to do that?

Identi.ca is often described as “an open source twitter” which it is, but it’s also the first instance of the Open Microblogging standard, which I believe will become increasingly important. Where Twitter users all share the same service, and are entirely dependent on Twitter for their ability to reach other, Identi.ca enables subscriptions across services, removing the need for a single point of failure.

Twitter Fail Whale, screenshot by John Rees

In other words, Twitter is a bit like the early days of email, when Compuserve users couldn’t email AOL users, and neither set of users could email the Internet. (I quality that with “a bit” since the Twitter API certainly makes possible clients which can do more than just post to Twitter). Identi.ca (or laconi.ca, as the software project behind identi.ca is called) is more like modern, decentralized, global-address-space email.

When identi.ca first launched, many folks were left stuck between the two alternatives: use identi.ca, which was more open and federated, or stay on Twitter, where a strong, rapidly developing community already existed (and, frankly, where many of the folks you were already talking to and listening to were unlikely to be persuaded to move en masse).

Evan Prodromou of Laconi.ca (photo by Zach Copley)

This ability means that for me, a version of Twitter Tools which would post to identi.ca (and let identi.ca cross-post to Twitter) was preferrable. Luckily, identi.ca has also implemented an API which responds to the same commands in the same way as the Twitter API.

This means that the changes needed are very simple.

In version 1.5.1a of Twitter Tools, lines 67-72 define the API endpoints to be used:


define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'http://twitter.com/statuses/show/###ID###.json');
define('AKTT_PROFILE_URL', 'http://twitter.com/###USERNAME###');
define('AKTT_STATUS_URL', 'http://twitter.com/###USERNAME###/statuses/###STATUS###');
define('AKTT_HASHTAG_URL', 'http://search.twitter.com/search?q=###HASHTAG###');


The key is to change these to map to the corresponding identi.ca API endpoints:


define('AKTT_API_POST_STATUS', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.json');
define('AKTT_API_USER_TIMELINE', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/user_timeline.json');
define('AKTT_API_STATUS_SHOW', 'http://identi.ca/api/statuses/show/###ID###.json');
define('AKTT_PROFILE_URL', 'http://identi.ca/###USERNAME###');
define('AKTT_STATUS_URL', 'http://identi.ca/notice/###STATUS###');
define('AKTT_HASHTAG_URL', 'http://identi.ca/###HASHTAG###');


For the most part, this just means replacing ‘twitter.com’ with ‘identi.ca/api’ except that the individual post urls and hashtag url have to be handled differently.

If you’re planning to use the sidebar widget, which includes a link to hashtags when you use them in a notice. , you’ll also need to find this line:

$hashtag = urlencode('#' . $hashtag);

And change it to:

$hashtag = urlencode($hashtag);

Finally, I also chose to update the “give credit” line, which occurs in two places in the code (not to remove credit for Twitter Tools but to point out the changes):

First, at roughly line 403 (this one is used in the blog post digest of tweets):

$content .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

I changed that to:

$content .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/2009/01/25/identica-tools">Identi.ca Tools</a>, a modified version of <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

And again later at line 768 (this is the one used in the sidebar widget):

$output .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

Which I changed to:

$output .= '<p class="aktt_credit">Powered by <a href="http://www.openparenthesis.org/2009/01/25/identica-tools">Identi.ca Tools</a>, a modified version of <a href="http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress">Twitter Tools</a>.</p>';

This same approach could also be leveraged for other laconi.ca based sites with little effort.

Remember that these changes will get overwritten if you upgrade to newer versions of the Twitter Tools plugin.

(Here’s my modified copy of twitter-tools.php – just change the extension back to .php)

• 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.)

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: