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Open Twittering

Posted on 16 Jun 2009 at 00:00

Ian Wrigley demonstrates how a twitter clone, laconica, can provide a sensible way to keep all the members of a development team in the loop.

Twitter, ah, Twitter. Everyone's heard of it these days - it's the site du jour not only for we technorati but also for civilians now that Stephen Fry, Ashton and Demi, and even Oprah have endorsed it (even PC Pro has given its approval - you can follow the team's thoughts by adding pc_pro).

For those of you who've been living in a cave in Tora Bora (or simply avoiding the cool kids) for the last year or so, let me explain that Twitter is a so-called "microblogging" service that allows you to post messages of up to 140 characters in length that appear immediately on your page on the Twitter website. These messages can be posted from a desktop application, directly from the Twitter site itself or from your mobile phone, and you can also set up your mobile to receive "Tweets" sent by friends who you're "following", so rest assured that you won't miss a single one of their random thoughts, nor they yours.

Now, before I reveal my age by starting to sound too cynical, I'll have to admit that I've actually managed to get myself somewhat suckered into Twitter. It's actually a great way to keep up with one or two of my friends who are always far too busy to actually, you know, meet in the physical world, and yet seem to have an unbounded amount of time available to painstakingly tap out on their iPhones almost hourly updates on what they're currently up to. I have one friend who's spent the last week on vacation in New York and I'm amazed that she managed to see any of the sights at all, so voluminous was her tweeting.

Anyway, the purpose of the column this month isn't to sell you on the value of Twitter per se (which is just as well, since I'm clearly not doing a good job at that). Rather, I want to suggest that Twitter - or an open-source clone of it called Laconica - can provide a sensible way to keep all the members of a development team informed about what each of them is up to. By adopting Laconica rather than the public Twitter service you get to manage the server yourself, and so you can keep it locked down so that only people you want to invite have access to your status updates. (There's a way of doing that on Twitter - sort of - but if you manage your own server you can be rather more certain that you've configured everything correctly, and not inadvertently opened up your team's innermost thoughts to the whole world.)

There are actually several different Twitter clones out there already, which range from very basic to the very advanced. The original Twitter was written in Ruby On Rails, and its history was a prime cause of the myth that "Rails doesn't scale", because it was so often unavailable in its first year of operation while its developers scrabbled to iron out kinks from the system. Most of the Twitter clones, though, use PHP as their scripting engine, which means that you can run them on even the most basic web-hosting package.

Probably the largest, most fully-featured of these clones is Laconica, whose range of features is extremely impressive and in some ways rivals Twitter itself. (I'm sure it wouldn't scale as well as the real thing, but for our purposes its performance is absolutely fine.) To install Laconica you'll need a web server that supports PHP 5.2, ideally Apache 2.2 or above to enable some of the neat features such as "friendly URLs", plus the MySQL database server at version 5 or above. Follow the configuration instructions to set up the database, visit the configuration page to supply a database hostname, username and password, and you're all set.