Planet

Montreal, Tuesday 9 March 2010 – StatusNet Inc launched the StatusNet Cloud Service (SCS) for public beta today. The SCS allows anyone to quickly setup a status update site at http://status.net with one of three different plans: single-user, community, and private. Over 10,000 organizations from the Sacramento Kings NBA team to software provider Mozilla are currently using the StatusNet cloud as their social platform of choice.
 
The StatusNet Cloud Service is based on the recent release of StatusNet 0.9 server software. It implements the OStatus (http://ostatus.org) standard that lets people on different social networks follow each other. Chris Messina, Open Web Advocate at Google says, "OStatus, and its component parts, form the basis for what's coming next, and it's thrilling to see Status.net, in particular, put these technologies to effective use — driving forward the next generation of online social experiences."
 
Evan Prodromou, CEO and founder of StatusNet says, "With StatusNet Cloud Service, we're providing a powerful simple solution that fits the needs of individuals and organizations on both the public and private Web. StatusNet Cloud Service provides all users an unprecedented level of configuration over updates, connecting to different networks with OStatus, controlling brand and image, while allowing connections to different social networks."
 
Organizations like Mozilla and wikiHow are using the community cloud plan to provide an easy way to enhance their community. "wikiHow is adopting StatusNet to bond our community together," says Jack Herrick, founder of wikiHow. "Communicating in efficient, real time bursts is fun for our community and brings them closer to our wiki. We selected StatusNet because they had leading technology based on open standards." Mark Surman, Executive Director of Mozilla Foundation says, "I love how status.net is really about giving people more freedom in the cloud. It will be interesting to see how the new Mozilla install helps us stay connected as a community."
 
Others, like Bite-size Edits and Creative Commons use the StatusNet Cloud for private communication. "We're a small start-up, and we have team members all around the world, in different timezones," says Hugh MacGuire, founder of Bite-size Edits. "Status.net is an invaluable tool for keeping on top of things, and for maintaining that team spirit and cohesion when everyone is scattered all over the place. It's more informal than email, more social than a project management software, and much better for asynchronous communications than chat and other similar real-time tools. It's really an ideal way to keep a dispersed team working well together."
 
Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, states, "StatusNet has filled a communications gap for Creative Commons that we didn't know we had. With a team distributed by time zone, travel, expertise, and use of various communications methods (email overload, IM, IRC, phone), StatusNet is accessible and usable by the whole staff and has become an invaluable tool for keeping us all in sync."
 
For More Information

• http://status.net/cloud
• http://status.net
• http://ostatus.org
• http://kingspostup.com/
• http://mozilla.status.net/
• http://wikihow.status.net/

 
About StatusNet Inc.
StatusNet Inc, based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, provides the Open Source microblogging server StatusNet, popularly used on Identi.ca and thousands of other websites globally. The company provides support packages, custom development, and a hosted cloud service.
Press Contact
Jon Phillips +1.510.499.0894 press@status.net http://status.net/press

One of the features I'm most excited about in the recent StatusNet 0.9.0 release is OStatus. OStatus is a protocol that lets people on different social networks follow each other.

There are thousands of companies and organizations using StatusNet for a private network either hosted or inside their firewall. We think that's great; it's one of the cloud plans we're offering, and our StatusNet Enterprise Network provides commercial support for the software.
But we also want our software to be valuable for the public social Web. That's the network effect at work: the value of a communications technology goes up by the square of the number of people on it. The problem here is that as Open Source software we expect thousands or even millions of sites running our software; we'd need to have a protocol to link this network of networks together.
When I first designed StatusNet in the Spring of 2008, there were no distributed social networking protocols. So, I made one up. OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) 0.1 used a Webhooks pattern and integrated OAuth for authorization, but it was designed for microblogging in 2008. It pushed plain text messages one way, from publishers to subscribers, without much context involved.
OMB did the job well enough, but the world's changed a lot since then. We expect much more two-way interaction and rich context from status updates than we did in 2007 and 2008. OMB didn't handle linking people you mention, or passing along HTML versions of notices, or lat/long values for notices, or replies to people who aren't subscribed to you. Our team was reluctant to enhance OMB for these and other features; it was really made more as a statement of purpose than a long-term protocol.
Luckily for us, there have been a number of advances in the distributed social Web in the last two years. In Fall of 2009, we started re-designing OMB. We abandoned any attempt at backwards compatibility, so we were really able to come up with a system built of shiny new components that make more sense.
These components are:

• Atom or RSS for feeds. These standard feed formats make it easy to include rich information like location, thread context, and HTML formatting in status updates.
• PubSubHubbub for real-time. PubSubHubbub (or PuSH) is an HTTP-based protocol for pushing feed entries from publishers to subscribers. It lets people on different servers receive status updates in real-time (or "real-enough time").
• Salmon for replies. Salmon is an excellent, distributed, secure protocol for sending messages "upstream" -- from subscribers to publishers. And since it uses Atom or RSS elements to structure those messages, it's easy to include lots of rich data in these messages.
• ActivityStreams for social events. There is a lot of information in a social network that's not explicitly a status update: follows, faves, repeats ("retweets"). We use ActivityStreams to encode these events, which then either flow through PuSH out to a network of subscribers, or get posted through salmon to the recipients. This lets sites on both sides keep track of followers and friends with a minimum of data transfer.
• Webfinger for discovery. We needed an easy way for people to say, "Follow me!" Webfinger gives people identities available across the Internet that look like email addresses. We use this for discovering people on the network; you can follow me at evan@status.net.

 
Putting these pieces together, we were able to make the new, distributed social networking system that's part of StatusNet 0.9.0. It's great; flexible and simple and high-performance and fun and easy to use.
We wanted more sites to implement these protocols so the network becomes even more valuable. Some parts have been implemented already by sites like Google Buzz, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, and Tumblr. We want to make sure that sites that have taken those first few steps make the next ones to build a truly distributed social Web.
So we've put a name on this suite of protocols: OStatus. We want people who are looking for a way to distribute status updates to know that there's an easy, standard way to go. We think that the more OStatus participants, the better the network becomes.
We've published the OStatus suite's definition as OStatus 1.0 Draft 1. It's not a long spec; it depends on the great work that's been done on the component protocols, with a teensy bit of glue to make everything even out right. We think it's a natural and obvious way to use these protocols together, and we hope to see more sites on the OStatus network moving forward.
What comes next?

1. We're going to be working on the spec to make it easier to understand and implement.
2. We'll be soliciting feedback from the upstream protocols' communities to make sure we got things right.
3. We'll be reaching out to sites that seem like good candidates for OStatus implementation to let them know how things go.
4. We'll continue to improve the StatusNet implementation of OStatus to make it more compliant and to show off the features of the protocol.

We hope that people interested in distributed social networking and distributed status updates continue to engage with OStatus. We're optimistic about its growth.

I'm honored to be the one who gets to announce the release of StatusNet 0.9.0. This is the latest version of our software, and represents almost 8 months of hard work by the StatusNet developer community. It's available for immediate download from the status.net site.
This release includes the following new features:
 

• Support for the new distributed status update standard OStatus, based on PubSubHubbub, Salmon, Webfinger, and Activity Streams.
• Support for location using the Geolocation API. Notices are (optionally) marked with lat-long information with geo microformats, and can be shown on a map.
• No fixed content size. Notice size is configurable, from 1 to unlimited number of characters. Default is still 140!
• An authorization framework, allowing different levels of users.
• A Web-based administration panel.
• A moderation system that lets site moderators sandbox, silence, or delete uncooperative users.
• A flag system that lets users flag profiles for moderator review.
• Support for OAuth authentication in the Twitter API.
• User roles system that lets the owner of the site to assign administrator and moderator roles to other users.
• A pluggable authentication system.
• An authentication plugin for LDAP servers.
• Many features that were core in 0.8.x are now plugins, such as OpenID, Twitter integration, Facebook integration
• A much-improved offline processing system
• In-browser "realtime" updates using a number of realtime servers (Meteor, Orbited, Cometd)
• A plugin to provide an interface optimized for mobile browsers
• Support for Facebook Connect
• Support for logging in with a Twitter account
• Vastly improved translation with additional languages and translation in plugins
• Support for all-SSL instances
• Core support for "repeats" (like Twitter's "retweets")
• Pluggable caching system, with plugins for Memcached, APC, XCache, and a disk-based cache
• Plugin to support RSSCloud
• A framework for adding advertisements to a public site, and plugins for Google AdSense and OpenX server
• Plugins to throttle excessive subscriptions and registrations.
• A plugin to blacklist particular URLs or nicknames.

 
There are also literally thousands of bugs fixed and minor features added. A full changelog is available at StatusNet 0.9.0/Changelog.
Under the covers, the software has a vastly improved plugin and extension mechanism that makes writing powerful and flexible additions to the core functionality much easier.
I'd like to give my hearty congratulations to the StatusNet developer team, to the wider StatusNet development community, to our legion of translators at translatewiki.net, and to all the users who've given us helpful suggestions to making this software better.