Free Software Linux

It's back - yes it is. Jaiku has arisen from the depths of Google and is now offering unlimited invites to all. Google acquired the microblogging service back in the October of last year and we've heard very little about it since then. Perhaps now that school is back in, Google sees an opportunity to grab a market away from Twitter.

Many folks have been looking for an “Open Source Twitter” for about as long as Twitter itself has been popular. Here’s a shortlist of those projects I’m aware of - please do let me know in the comments if there are others I’ve missed.

Identi.ca is a new micro-blogging service which runs the open source Laconica platform. Ultimately, this will likely be the distributed, open microblogging platform twitter fans have been waiting for (though the community itself seems mostly to be sticking with Twitter, fail whale and all). For now, it’s just fun to play around with. I just releases an Identi.ca action stream plugin - get version 1.0 on my Movable Type Action Streams Plugins page. Here’s what the output looks like:

San Francisco based micro-blogging site Twitter has managed to secure US $15 million dollars in VC funding as reported by tech blog GigaOm, leaving them with a valuation of US $80 million dollars. This comes at an interesting time for the site, which has spent the past few days in a constant struggle to stay up and running.

Google has released an addition to their RSS aggregator, Google Reader. The addition, “Note in Reader”, acts like a bookmarking tool that is then transferred to your shared items in Google Reader. Unfortunately for Google, this has been done (with incredible success) by other companies already. Can Google compete?