Mar 23 2011

Whew.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter at all lately, you’ll know that I’ve been working hard on a new project lately. Tonight, even though it’s late, I’m finally getting it out there. Please welcome http://rstat.us/ to the world! (as soon as the DNS updates. ;) )

rstat.us is a micro-blogging service, just like Twitter. There’s one big difference, though: it is distributed. Oh, and it’s 100% open source. So two things. It’s also integrated with Facebook and Twitter, so you can just log in with either of those accounts, and it’ll syndicate your posts. Well, just to Twitter right now, but we’re getting there.

Here’s the other cool thing: Want to own your data? You can actually get the code and run a copy yourself! But you won’t get left out: you can follow anyone else that uses the ostatus protocol, like http://identi.ca/, and it’ll Just Work. You just have to grab the URL to their feed, put it in, and it’s all good! But you probably shouldn’t do that yet. We’re still working on some features.

rstat.us is still very much alpha quality. 7 or 8 of my best friends and I have been fighting off sleep, food, and tests for the last two weeks to put this together. Please give it a try and let me know what you think, tell me if you can break it, or anything else that’s particularly interesting. If you’re the coding type, please check out the wiki for a big old list of stuff we’d like to do.

Oh, and of course, you should follow me on rstat.us.