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

brackin · on March 17, 2011

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.

jasonmcalacanis · on March 17, 2011

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.

AAinslie · on March 17, 2011

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.

ZeroGravitas · on March 12, 2011

I think a Twitter inspired version of this already exists:

http://identi.ca/doc/faq

brackin · on March 17, 2011

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.

fedd · on March 12, 2011

seems interesting!

javery · on March 17, 2011

We don't need an open source web service - we need an open protocol like smtp, ftp, rss, etc.