Pretty awesome! I've been working on a couchdb ostatus app for a few months. You guys can use the frontend if you want: http://github.com/maxogden/couchappspora

My first thought: why not use (and contribute to) StatusNet? My second thought: who wants to contribute to a PHP project (StatusNet)?

StatusNet uses ostatus. So does rstat.us.

Exactly. And the point of standards like OStatus (and it's component specs) is that we don't all have to be using (or contributing to) the same software... instead we can build a myriad of apps that work together.

Of course. They (StatusNet) were actually the authors of it (I believe). I'm not against having multiple implementations by any means.

It just seems very knee jerk to start your own so quickly. "I hate Twitter. Hey, use my version of Twitter that's open, but allows you to sign in with Twitter."

Then again, he might have decided that StatusNet has too many dependencies and was looking for something super simple--I don't know.

Why do people keep coming up with new open source applications to compete with Twitter (and a lesser extent Facebook)? The way to disrupt these isn't with an application -- it's with a protocol.

They all use the same protocol: ostatus

Checkout the unhosted.org project for a group that is taking on this project large scaple.

Is there a way to run it (maybe not now, but in the future) not in Heroku?

I don't see why not. It looks like a standard Rack application so you could follow any guide to deploying rack applications, for example using Passenger (http://www.modrails.com/documentation.html) or Unicorn and nginx (http://blog.tomkersten.com/2010/11/14/nginx-unicorn-rvm-serv...).

You could run it anywhere, it is just a sinatra/rack app.

It's nice to have choice, but I'm wondering when people will be able to install those applications themselves. Services are so web 2.0 :-p

Status.net uses OStatus and is open source: http://status.net/open-source