Hate Laconica. Build from the ground up. - Matthew DeVries

Laconica has 85% of the needed functionality. Big additional code would be feed-scraping and clustering feeds for accounts. Building from the ground up is a big waste of time and effort. Also, as the Laconica creator and lead dev, I can commit to providing resources to make this project work. - Evan Prodromou

Oh, also: why do you hate Laconica? Good information to have! - Evan Prodromou

It's just Twitter - Matthew DeVries

Evan, how had you imagined building "plugins" for Laconia? Do you simply mean putting the "load" on the client? Indeed, a laconica and or Twitter client could add lots on top of the respective notification services to provide a FriendFeed-like experience. http://a.tinythread.com/ is a good example of this IMO. The threaded comments there look pretty friendfeed-ish imo. - Meryn Stol

Laconica has a server-side plugin architecture already. 3rd-party code can "hook" important events in the main code and enhance or replace the default processing for those events, firing either before or after the events occur. There are hookpoints in the code for UI events (showing the header, showing the sidebar, etc.) database and domain object events (saving a new status, saving a user profile, showing the user profile form, registering a new user). It's also possible to create whole new pages and integrate them seamlessly into the UI. - Evan Prodromou

@Matthew Devries, no, it's not! You need to look a little closer. - Evan Prodromou

Evan, I do not have any experience with Laconica. Does it already support threaded conversations? That would be a start. - Meryn Stol

@Meryn also, you may want to check out our threaded conversation pages like http://identi.ca/convers... . It's hierarchical, not flat like FF's, and it's based off the same @-reply mechanism that Twitter uses. But it could be customized to work more like Jaiku or Friendfeed (where comments are distinct from other notices.) - Evan Prodromou

Show me a threaded conversation with 10,000 characters of text. - Matthew DeVries

SMS as the core of the service? - Matthew DeVries

Laconica as a base need serious consideration, imho. - Micah Wittman

@evan, while I've got you 'on the line', I'd sure appreciate any feedback on my userscript for language translation - I'm close to finishing an adaptation for identi.ca, but at the moment you can test out the twitter port: http://translatorize.com/ Thanks! - http://identi.ca/micah - Micah Wittman

Matthew DeVries, no, SMS is not the core of the service. That would be crack-addled. - Evan Prodromou

Matthew DeVries: w/r/t 10K of text: not sure I understand what you mean. 10K for each notice? 10K total? What point are you trying to make? - Evan Prodromou

Can Laconica make a post like this? - Laconica is an open source microblogging server written in PHP that implements the OpenMicroBlogging standard for interoperation between installations. While offering functionality similar to Twitter, Laconica seeks to provide the potential for open, inter-service and distributed communications between microblogging communities. Enterprises and individuals can install and control their own services and data[3][4]. Contents [hide] * 1 Meaning of 'Laconica' * 2 Notable Deployments o 2.1 Identi.ca o 2.2 TWiT Army * 3 Features * 4 References * 5 External links [edit] Meaning of 'Laconica' Laconica's name is a reference to the Laconic phrase, a particularly concise or terse statement the likes of which are famously attributed to the leaders of Sparta (Laconia being the Greek region containing Sparta). In microblogging, all messages are forced to be very short due to the ~140 character limit on message size, thus they are all de facto laconic phrases. [edit] Notable Deployments Laconica is now prominently deployed on several dozen public services. [edit] Identi.ca The first Laconica deployment was the Identi.ca openmicroblogging service. Hosted by Laconica creators Control Yourself, Identi.ca offers free accounts to the public and serves as the flagship for the installable version of Laconica. [5] [edit] TWiT Army Another popular instance of Laconica is This Week in Tech's TWiT Army.[6] [edit] Features * Updates using a Jabber or Gtalk client, and probably any other XMPP client * OpenID authentication * Supports Federation, which provides the ability to subscribe to notices by users on a remote service through the OpenMicroBlogging protocol * SMS updates and notifications * A Twitter-compatible API * Hashtags * Multilingual interface (using Gettext) * Cross-posting to Twitter * Facebook integration * Groups * Automatic URL-shortening Upcoming priority features:[7] * More Ajax-y interface * Maps * Cross-posting to Jaiku, Plurk, etc. *... more... - Matthew DeVries

Sure seems like there is overlap between laconica and openff goals. Plugins could be a great way to fill any laconica gaps towards a Friendfeed like feature set - Jason Wehmhoener from iPhone

The Twitter ecosystem is showing sure signs of producing equal capabilities as FriendFeed (except for update speed - that's limited by the speed of the Twitter API), so I think that will eventually happen to Laconica too. If not, then I see not much future for Laconia anyway. Social media will not stop at 140 char microblogging. The future for Twitter - if any - is being a hub in something much bigger, something even more advanced than FriendFeed. - Meryn Stol

At the moment, I have big doubts though if even Twitter will survive. Other ways to do push notification (e.g. pubsubhubbub) pose a big threat. I'm talking long-term of course. But that doesn't make either Laconica or Twitter seem attractive for me as a developer to put time in. I'd rather invest in technologies which seem to have a bright future ahead. - Meryn Stol

@Matthew Devries, 0.8.x versions and below limited to 140 chars/notice. 0.9.x and above will support variable-length notices, from 1 to unlimited. We'll use truncation to deal with channels (like Twitter or SMS) that are space-constrained. - Evan Prodromou

Interesting idea, Evan Prodromou. Does Laconi.ca support real time through the web interface? - Vezquex: God of FF

@Raphael yes it does. We support three different real-time update servers: Cometd (using Bayeux), Orbited, and Meteor. We'll probably have a Strophe-based XMPP update at some point in the near future. BTW, that's all implemented with plugins. - Evan Prodromou

@Meryn Laconica supports a distributed protocol, OpenMicroBlogging, for a federated approach. We also have plugins in progress for RSSCloud, PubSubHubBub, XMPP PubSub, and FETHR. - Evan Prodromou

Great info. Thanks for dropping by, Evan! - Kevin L

You may have something here. I'll take a look at the documentation. - Vezquex: God of FF

I think comments as separate from notices is a big difference. Does Laconica do groups or lists? - Kevin L

Evan: What I mean is that anything evolved out of microblogging probably won't matter much for the future of the web and social media. I think the future belongs to completely standardized hubs, using the pubsubhubbub protocol or a protocol yet to be invented. I simply don't think microblogging will survive as a core technology. I think it will prove too limited by its past. - Meryn Stol

yes, Laconica does groups. It also has lists. - Evan Prodromou

Meryn, the "micro" part is a gimmick. Once you lift the character limit, there should be no problem. - Vezquex: God of FF

I don't see much reasons to have laconia hubs when there are "standardized" hubs, willing to route around anything inside an Atom feed. Why register for a particular when people can get push updates from across the web? All a user has to do in the future is produce an atom feed. The hubs will be invisible to the user. They only see their app, a kind of Wordpress or something. - Meryn Stol

BTW This is one of the reasons why I also probably won't be contributing to the OpenFF server clone. I don't think it has much future. I think we can already see the end of the road for centralized services. I still am interested in writing a client which can talk to all different (either centralized or federated) services out there... From a user's standpoint, broad compatibility with existing networks is a big plus. - Meryn Stol

Last I saw the OpenFF was building toward a decentralized setup, sending content not to the server, but to your friends, who connects to their friends, etc. - Matthew DeVries

Matthew, huh? I think the first goal is to build something very much technological the same as FriendFeed. Federation is the next step. But peer to peer is not even on the agenda (at least for the openff project as I know it). And as I said, I don't particularly like that roadmap. It does not really excite me. - Meryn Stol

I kindly invite everyone who want to think on more broad terms about "feed technology" to join http://friendfeed.com/feedtech :) - Meryn Stol

The very first thread I saw about the project, the consensus was to finally just push ahead with federation. If they've drifted from that goal, then yeah. boring. - Matthew DeVries

Laconi.ca is a natural choice to build a project of this type on top of, IMHO. - Earle Martin

Evan, I learned some interesting things about laconica from this thread and will be taking a closer look - Jason Wehmhoener

As this is a community open federated project I suggest to use open source Jaikuengine with pubsubhubbub running on Google Appengine. Reasons: Dealing with scalability(twitter has Big DDOS issues) Google infrastructure is the best, Real time push and pull based on pubsubhubbub (community hub is available). Jaiku threaded conversation is cool.It has Channels too. Regarding Macro (not 140) it can be extended. We have released one beta site using this architecture http://www.poboxpress.com . Right now this system also communicate with twitter with OAuth. Next step is to extend it to get the real time fetch from twitter, youtube, flickr using pubsubhubbub which we are working on. Comments are welcome! - Srini Vemula

You don't need to adapt laconica to that when NoseRub is so much close to what Friendfeed is. Actually, there are only a couple of features left in NoseRub to be a friendfeed clone (feature-wise, not presentation-wise). A running service using NoseRub is Identoo.com (Identoo is to NoseRub what identica is to laconica) - Marcos Marado

Marcos, does Noserub have some kind of plugin and/or theme architecture so that changes to Noserub can be made without coordinating those changes with the core Noserub development team? I ask because when I look at indentoo.com it doesn't look/work much like Friendfeed, so it's possible the Noserub team has different goals. However, if Noserub supports plugins and/or themes it's possible that different goals can be supported without any issue. - Jason Wehmhoener

If somebody wants to build plug-ins for Laconi.ca that make it more FriendFeed-like, or join the NoseRub project and add more FriendFeed-like functionality to that system, or just work on other projects that connect FriendFeed proper with Laconi.ca with NoseRub instances, I say more power to them. My impression to date has been that all that's distinct from the OpenFF effort, the intent of which is to build an OSS "clone" of FriendFeed as a new and separate project and code base. - Ken Sheppardson

BTW, I've spun this off into the Feed Tech group as http://friendfeed.com/feedtec... - Ken Sheppardson