One Click Twitter-Clone Now Offered By DreamHost
If you visit the DreamHost blog today, chances are you'll give a quick guffaw, shake your head in dismay at the state of the Internet and quickly close the browser tab.
But if you take a moment to read all the way to the end of the post, you'll find that the company has just announced the implementation of a one-click install for its open-source, white label microblogging service Status.net.
The blog, which features a tattooed beer belly and a cat sitting at a keyboard, is really showing off the proof-of-concept (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek site, PetStatus, a micro-blog for pets.
Buried down at the very bottom of the post is the following nugget of exciting information:
Status.net, our new one-click software package, powers the entire operation. DreamHost customers can now install Status.net to their own domains with a single mouse click - making specialized Twitter clones at whim in a matter of seconds!
Triss Hussey first noticed the real announcement, saying if it hadn't been for an email subscription to the blog it would have just passed on by.
We first wrote about Status.net a year ago, saying that the service could be an "incredible opportunity to analyze a rich and dynamic set of data about interpersonal conversation." The company just announced the launch of its public beta last Tuesday. And our Own Alex Williams just took a closer look at the service's future in the enterprise last week and argued that it "has the features that the enterprise customer wants and it has a strong developer community." A one-click installation means we may start seeing specialized Twitter-clones reproducing like rabbits across the Internet.
We can only hope that PetStatus isn't an omen of what's to come.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
The main problem with Status.net (as of the last time I used it) was that there was NO admin control panel at all--which means in a matter of days, your site just gets OVERRUN with spam and you have NO way to stop it. If they have an admin panel for it now, great, but, if not--doom.
I wonder how the "build your twitter clone" in seconds will affect twitter, pretty much the case with digg & the pligg CMS back in the days/now.
Hi Mike thanks for the link! I got my one-click install set up, but I think DreamHost has a couple bugs in the setup.
Regardless, I was expecting some kind of easy admin area, which there isn't...
Adding plugins is a bit odd, especially coming from WordPress, but I think the rough starts aren't really important.
One of my first things to do with the site (after locking it down so there are no more registrants), is to connect it to my Twitter account. So my answer to Marfi's question is being able to build your own Twitter clone could make Twitter stronger. It would be pretty handy to have a service-independant address like @trishussey.status.net and you could get my updates on Twitter or Identi.ca or our own Status.net install.
That's the hope at least.
Now I just need a couple hours to play with it.
There are, in fact, admin panels, moderation, and spam filters built into StatusNet 0.9.0.
I've been playing with this since yesterday, and between my own fiddling and talking with DH support I found out a few things.
First and foremost, the admin panel bug. It appears that DH's automatic installer creates a test user, and doesn't assign admin status to that user. You can fix this yourself by editing mysql, at least until Dreamhost implements their own fix: http://micro.edythemighty.com/notice/378
The admin panel gives you a handful of options, including configuring the length of the notices, site design, site registrations, setting the site private, and more. This is all located in a link at the top labeled Admin.
http://micro.edythemighty.com/attachment/68
there are alot of twitter clones out there
http://www.commentbug.com