I just read a train-wreck of a post over at Techcrunch on the funding that StatusNet just received.  In terms of getting just the facts across, it accomplishes the job. StatusNet, the company behind federated Twitter clone Identi.ca, received $875,000 in seed funding.

Aside from that, Erick’s analysis displayed a shocking lack of insight on status microblogging, as it extends past the realm of Twitter.

The paragraph that tripped me up in the post was this one:

The bet here is that just as millions of people run their own blogs, millions of people and companies will want to run their own microblogs as well. Offering a microblogging platform as a hosted service will allow StatusNet to pursue a strategy similar to WordPress.com. It will offer the basic service for free, and then charge power-users for extras. Note that WordPress is itself pursuing this strategy with P2 (which used to be called Prologue).

The way P2 works is fundamentally different and separate from the goals and aims of StatusNet / Laconi.ca. As someone who administers what might be the most popularly used installation of P2, I’m probably qualified to make some analysis on this topic, so if you’ll allow me…

In it’s essence, P2 is simply a theme for WordPress.  If you want to see what a largely unmodified P2 theme looks like, you should tune in to any of our liveblog coverage that we do of the various Silicon Valley area events, including TC50, IDF09 and SAPTechEd09. Functionally, what the theme does, is make it so that comments appear inline on the main blog page, incorporates an AJAX-style JavaScript system so that updates appear nearly instantaneously, and moves the “create post” form to the front page so that logged in users with permission can create posts on the fly.

There are other very cool features to this, but that’s the basics.  It’s a theme, and if you have the patience to work with largely uncommented code, it can serve as a framework for further theme design.  What do I mean by that?  If you’re viewing this through the website (as opposed to via the RSS feed), you’ll notice that we have many of the aforementioned features on our main blog (at siliconangle.net/ver2). That’s because we’ve taken the time to incorporate those features into our existing theme, using the original P2 theme as a framework for further design.

We’ve used the P2 framework a number of ways here at SiliconANGLE.  We’ve used it as a chat room for live events, we’ve used it as a liveblogging platform, we’ve used it as an editorial backchannel and we’ve used it as a main blogging platform.  It has little to do with creating a “self-hosted Twitter,” as the uses for Twitter are almost entirely different than the uses we’ve constructed here at SiliconANGLE.  Comparing it to Twitter is the type of comparison you’d make to someone who’s either looking for similar surface design elements, or how you’d explain it to your Grandma who watched Larry King talk about Twitter for an hour and for some reason wants to know what you’re doing with WordPress this week. 

It isn’t, though, how you’d want to describe it to the ostensibly tech-savvy audience of Techcrunch.  If your interested in WordPress’s forays that could possibly supplant Twitter, you’d do better looking at BuddyPress’s activity stream product roadmap, but I digress…

What is StatusNet / Laconi.ca?

Erick says that StatusNet is a self-hosted WordPress of Twitter.  Erick’s playing the right game (buzzword bingo), but he’s laying down all the wrong tiles.  StatusNet is actually a federated, open source Twitter clone. What does that mean, though?

Remember the fail whale?  The promise and primary feature of StatusNet is the federated status of it’s network and the abolition of that damned whale.  StatusNet  allows individuals and organizations to set up status microblogging hubs for their community, and having the public timelines synchronize with the larger cloud of the community.

If your normal hub to connect to goes down for whatever reason, your status updates aren’t lost forever, and you’re access to the network isn’t denied.  Much like when an individual chat server goes down on IRC, the larger chat network stays intact and continues to function as a whole.

Why won’t it take off and surpass Twitter?  The odds are against it, though not for the incomprehensible reason Erick mentions (“it’s just not Twitter”  what? does that sentence mean anything?).

The power of Twitter, as in any social network, lies largely not in the feature set but in the community.  The features are what entice the community to come, but the community and social interaction that takes place there is what will ultimately keep them there or drive them off.  Twitter has long since achieved critical mass, so unless Twitter is subversively supplanted (something not outside the realm of possibility), StatusNet won’t take over the market.

Remember all the sound and fury over real-time services like PubSubHubBub and RSSCloud?  If you retained much information from the descriptions of their architecture, then understanding StatusNet should be somewhat easy.

In the end, though, this is the only way we’ll ever see a distributed status microblogging network – the last line of Erick’s post is ignorant of the past and the facts as well.

Erick says: “In fact, Twitter might want to think about [creating a federated, open-source microblogging platform], and sell Twitter server software to corporations.”

Twitter has said that this isn’t going to happen, and had taken federation off the product roadmap.  From a post Jesse Stay put out on Louis Gray’s blog:

In a very quiet announcement in a bug request on Google today, Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, announced the popular microupdate service would switch the status of implementing OpenMicroblogger support from "Accepted", to "Won’t Fix".  In the words of Payne, "We’ve considered this request, and we feel that OpenMicroBlogging doesn’t map cleanly onto the services and methods that the Twitter API provides, particularly as we expand our set of methods in the next release."

Here’s How StatusNet Could Win

StatusNet could win, in much the same way I theorized WordPress could win the race:

One of the theories I’ve been operating under for quite a while now is that Twitter is the backbone of “the public timeline” as we now know it.  That, of course, could theoretically change if Facebook or Google stepped up to the plate in their respective forays into RTW, but as it now stands, Twitter is the current king of that hill.

Twitter is slowly evolving into a protocol, and less of a conversational tool.  You can see it with the slow creep into your timeline of urls, #hashtags, location tags, @replies, and all manner of add on services.  Everything is abbreviated, shortened, hyperlinked and otherwise made smaller to fit into the limitation that is 140 characters. It is to the point where you almost need a third party client just to make any sense of it.

Third party clients: The most popular way to access Twitter isn’t through the web interface – only 27% of Twitter users back in April chose to interact with it that way. Clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck wield an unruly amount of influence. Many of the third party clients also support other social networking platforms like Facebook.

These clients sit in the enviable position, or at least might soon sit there, of determining exactly what it is that most real time web users get to interact with. Seesmic, Tweetdeck and the top three or four iPhone Twitter clients could form a consortium and suddenly mirror everything that takes place on Twitter to a third party or federated platform – in essence deprecating Twitter and Facebook in one fell swoop.

At some point, third party clients will tire of the bizarre and ever changing API limitations, and always being stuck with the whims of Twitter. An alliance between the most popular Twitter clients to start supporting and push people towards alternative Twitter-like networks could create the momentum needed for initiatives like StatusNet (or WordPress, should they position themselves correctly) to truly take off.