Cross post Twitter to StatusNet with StatusNet Tools

A few weeks back I created a little plugin that works with Alex King’s Twitter Tools, using an API it provides to also post your notices to a StatusNet instance (Identi.ca, Twit.tv, etc).

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).
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Tracking Keywords in Twitter

Tracking the occurrence of keywords in twitter through one of the automated tools is a quick way to add value to your experience.

Brands often use this approach to track mentions of their products and companies, developers can use it to track mentions of their favorite languages, frameworks, and open source projects, and anyone can use it to track mentions of their hometown, their own twitter username (to make sure you don’t miss any @replies).
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State of the Twittersphere – Q4 2008 Report

Just catching up on some of the blogs and tweets I missed over the holidays. The folks at HubSpot, who are also the folks behind TwitterGrader and WebSite Grader, put out a State of the Twittersphere Report, modeled on the old Technorati State of the Blogosphere reports.

It’s got some interesting stats, though I’d wonder if the self-selecting audience of folks who tried Twitter Grader isn’t a bigger problem in terms of the basis of the analysis.
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Open Source Microblogging

Many folks have been looking for an “Open Source Twitter” for about as long as Twitter itself has been popular.

Here’s a shortlist of those projects I’m aware of – please do let me know in the comments if there are others I’ve missed.

• Sweetter 2.0 – an “open source and fun microbloging service . . . being develop[ed] by SUGUS (group of GNU users from the University of Seville).” Go here for code. Based on TurboGears, a python-based web application framework. Affero GPL (AGPL)
• Jisko – Affero GPL (AGPL) licensed framework for microblogging, PHP 5 and MySQL. I had to use Google Translation to try to read the wiki, as I no hablo espanol.
• Yonkly – written in ASP.NET by Emad Ibrahim. Code hasn’t yet been fully released but you can get an early version here. (License is not yet specified though it is described as “open source.”)
• Twoorl – a GPL (3) implementation of a microblogging service in Erlang using ErlyWeb. Started (and entirely written?) by Yariv Sadan
• Prologue – not really a microblogging platform per se, but a Wordpress Theme which could be used as a microblogging platform. (Note that the Prologue post itself kills Firefox 3 for me – caveat browser). Prologue is available under the GPL, as is Wordpress itself.
• Laconica, which is the software which powers Identi.ca. Also Affero GPL (AGPL). This is perhaps the most robust, and is based on the Open Micro Blogging protocol. It also embeds creative commons licensing on the content people publish, which I think is great but others may have issues with.

Am I missing other open source twitter approaches?

Has anyone created a Movable Type theme which does microblogging?

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: