In the last two years microblogging tools knew a great expansion, mainly Twitter service which turned quickly into a giant communication platform with only 140 characters. If you are interested to run your own Twitter-like platform for your company or your community, Status.net is a great open source communication platform which provides a similar service to Twitter, Jaiku and Plurk.
StatusNet is written in PHP and uses a set of PHP packages from PEAR in addition to other open source solutions such XMPPHP, PHP-OpenID, OAuth, Markdown, PECL Mailparse, in addition to the free open-source SQL full-text search engine Sphinx.
Status.Net support plugins and API. Their API is compatible with Twitter API which make it possible to use with any of the software already available for Twitter such Gwibber, Twhirl, Witty, … in addition to many online services including ping.fm, twitterfeed. Laconica came also with a built-in Facebook application which will update your Facebook status automatically with your Laconica microblogging platform.
Many plugins are already included in Laconica mainly the blogspam.net integration, Google Analytics, Linkback tool, and Piwik analytics. More plugins could be added also such the Lacon-iCal, MediaWiki style links, … etc. Or you can create your own plugin to provides more additional functionalities.
One of the services running StatusNet is http://identi.ca; you can have a look, register and experiment some of StatusNet features.
StatusNet installation is detailed for different platform including windows, ubuntu, debian and FreeBSD. Installation requires PHP 5.2.x with Curl, XMLWriter, MySQL,GD,MBString, and gettext enabled, MySQL 5.x, Apache 2.2.x with mod_rewrite enabled. You will need also memcache, Mailparse and Sphinx search, in addition to a php accelerator such APC to speed up the solution.
Official installation instructions could be found here and latest stable version is 0.8.0.
Released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.
Update : This post have been updated since Laconica became StatusNet.
