Steren's essays

I’m sure you know about twitter. If you use it, you read and share links, ideas and statuses… with everyone.
Now imagine the same tool, but restricted to your team. This is StatusNet. (and it’s even much more than this actually)

Private timeline

At Beansight, we’ve been using StatusNet since the beginning. Examples: You start working on something? Take 3 seconds to post it on your StatusNet. You spotted an interesting link? Share it with your team on StatusNet. You’ll be late for the meeting? StatusNet. You’ve got a problem? StatusNet.
If it is well used, it’s like sharing the same mind. You are aware of what the others are doing or thinking and you can reply to them in real time. Isn’t this awesome when you work in an agile environment?

Did I mentioned it costs nothing ? You can start using it privately with your team for free at status.net/cloud. (iPhone, Android or desktop app included)

Of course, we keep using e-mails for structured threads.

I know there are some other tools, and they may be better at doing this (Wedoist, Yammer…). So here comes the second part of this post:

Open

To be more precise, StatusNet is an open source microblogging platform. This means that you can deploy it on your own servers without having to rely on a particular service provider. It is branded under your name. And you own your data. Trust me, this is something large companies are looking for (A startuper thinks it’s Ok to use Google Apps for work, now try to explain this to a big company).

StatusNet can be federated, which means that public nodes can talk to each other. They all create a global and distributed network. Moreover, it uses an open protocol. You know, the same way it works for e-mails, where you can talk to someone who is not necessarily using the same provider than you. We tend to forget how important it is for innovation to keep the pipes opened.

I think open procotols matter. Can’t you see a problem in the previous image? Haven’t you learned that relying on one ressource is dangerous? Apparently many don’t see the issue and even try to build a business upon this closed API.

You can follow me (@steren) on identi.ca, a very popular public instance of StatusNet.

Last precision: Google Buzz is also promoting open protocols. Unfortunately, they are different from StatusNet. I hope these two systems will become compatible in a near future. Edit: Evan (StatusNet creator), tells us in the comments that you can already follow a Buzz user with StatusNet and that they are working together to support interoperability.