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Ask HN: Any example of a community owned web service? (thinking of Twitter)

2 points by fedd ↗ HN
we know open source software, community driven standards like W3C and Unicode, etc. why not to make a Twitter clone so that everyone would be free to use it in any way? are there some examples of something similar? big members like FB, MS, Google would pay for hosting, bandwidth :)

7 comments

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ZeroGravitas
I think a Twitter inspired version of this already exists:

http://identi.ca/doc/faq

fedd
seems interesting!
brackin
It's not good enough and doesn't have very good marketing, sounds silly but this'd need to look decent and be appealing to users.
jasonmcalacanis
Answer: It's really expensive and complicated to run an at-scale, common infrastructure project. If identi.ca got to scale it might cost $100-200k a month for servers and bandwidth. That doesn't take into account building out five to ten sysadmins and a customer support department.

Of course, Wikipedia has done it.... last I heard they had hundreds of servers in four locations. That has to cost millions a year to service.

javery
We don't need an open source web service - we need an open protocol like smtp, ftp, rss, etc.
brackin
I was saying this! We should do this. Get lot's of twitter clients to integrate this as an option so if twitter ever pushes developers further they aren't dead and this service gets lot's of users.

Also I think the reason Identica sucks is because it doesn't think about features or design. This has to do some things twitter doesn't but shouldn't be over the top, it should be lean so that it's not like facebook and have a great API.

AAinslie
There's OneSocialWeb http://bit.ly/OneSocialWeb with a great engineering team (talented chaps like @eschnou) and backing of deep pocketed Vodafone. Open sourced under an Apache 2 license.

Also there's the free open source distributed/federated www.ThinkUpApp.com from Gina Trapani and Anil Dash which can probably be built out into something along the lines of what you are thinking.