StatusNet

1) Never heard of App.net until now. I don't like the name. It's too technical. I prefer the name Quitter (Qwitter, kwitter). If you want to build something for the people, make it appealing in name and image to a 7-year-old.

2) Does the service have an API, similar or the same as Twitter's? "the structure of the Java APIs that Oracle was trying to assert can't be copyrighted at all" http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/google-wins-crucial-api-ruling-oracles-case-decimated/

3) Status.net is open-source microblogging. http://status.net/packages - it became a hero, but for businesses.

4) There should be a way to give or pledge bitcoins. I don't care for state-backed fiat currency anymore - it's just like twitter, manipulated for economic gain by its issuers to the point of breaking its users.

5) There should be a "pledge to quit" .. something like "I'll pledge to quit but only if accounts up to 500,000 followers do the same" http://www.pledgebank.com/

6) Who's going to commercially benefit most from the service in the long-run?

7) Can this site just copy my existing twitter feed, until I am ready to close that one down?

I'm one of the co-authors of the OStatus spec and the lead developer on StatusNet (http://status.net/) and the ActivityPump (http://activitypump.org/).

I think the secret weapon in the OStatus arsenal is that there are literally hundreds of millions (literally HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS) of PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds on the Web.

Blogger, YouTube, WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Posterous as well as StatusNet and Diaspora* all provide PuSH-enabled feeds. That's a huge body of content to follow in real time.

Another good part is that PubSubHubbub will help with SEO -- Google Search bots subscribe to PuSH-enabled streams, which gets you indexed faster. Lots of incentive is good for getting things done.

There is distinctly lower support for the other parts of the OStatus stack. But I hope we'll see this stack continue to develop.

Synchronous communication typically means something that demands your attention as soon as something is sent. Asynchronous communication is something that typically handled whenever you're ready for it. To put it in programming terms, synchronous communication "blocks" until you deal with it, where as asynchronous doesn't require you to deal with it until you're ready to.

https://www.worldwidelearn.com/education-advisor/questions/synchronous-asynchronous-learning.php

https://status.net/articles/synchronous-vs-asynchronous-communication/

It is built on the http://tent.io protocol which is like Despora (https://despora.de/) or StatusNet (http://status.net/), where it is a decentralized social network. This use to be called http://tent.is, which was the first working 'example' twitter-like application of the protocol, but now I am assuming they wanted to create a business model, so they will offer storage on top of their twitter-like app, which will be accessed via tent protocol by other applications to store content (photos, videos, status messages, etc.)

Actually, Google+ is based on open standards, here is what Evan Prodromou (the creator of http://status.net, one of the biggest decentralized open source social network) has to say about the API:

> Activity Streams, PoCo, OAuth 2. I feel like the girl in Jurassic Park. "I know this!"

https://plus.google.com/104323674441008487802/posts/jJNsUDPcxkB

So, you couldn't get more open and decentralized than that. G+ api is read only for now though but the devs made it clear that it won't stay that way.

Because we need an aggregator. It's not like a blogging engine, where I can just use Wordpress. A social network needs people.

http://status.net/wiki/List_of_servers
http://encyclomundi.org/wiki/List_of_Independent_Statusnet_Instances
http://jpope.org/federatedusers

What's stopping anyone from building an aggregator?

Say, everybodytwitnow.com, where you can register your OStatus page, which then gets followed by the server and publically displayed? Bam, it's like Twitter, only actually cool.