Did a bit of fiddling yesterday with pump.io, which bills itself as “a stream server that does most of what people really want from a social network”. It’s node.js based, and it appears to let folks create accounts and post short status updates, and subscribe to other accounts and receive status updates.
So it’s facebook’s wall but without the horrible shitty rest of facebook, or twitter without the developer hostility. The project is only at version 0.2.1 and it’s very much alpha, but it was complete enough for me to get it mostly operational. I created a couple of test users and it seemed to work as advertised.
Not a lot of admin tools; I couldn’t find an easy way to delete my test users, for example.
I use Twitter pretty heavily in my daily work routine; it’s a good way to broadcast quick updates to the public, or take quick opinion polls, or just to say something witty. It’s also an excellent source of technology-focused news. I’ve got a good list of folks I’m following, and between them and the folks they follow, I tend to see significant stuff very, very quickly.
So, pump.io. Will keep an eye on it, and if it actually evolves some admin tools, I might open up a test instance that we can use to fake-tweet 