Probably everyone knows Twitter by now. And most of us have heard of Identi.ca, this weird, unpopular opensource offshoot non-Twitter clone thingy. It’s much better than that, actually - for one, you can download and install your own copy of Laconica - something I did last night. The result?

I have to say, I was very impressed with the smooth installation process - I was expecting worse, given the documentation. A few CSS tweaks and one massive JS hack later (I needed to make the Public Timeline update via AJAX, since page refreshes are a no-go), I present you with Mudaba.

For now, it’s just getting started, but there are two critical functions that Mudaba can do that Twitter apparently cannot, and I’m probably going to need community support to pull them off - XMPP support (ie, microblogging via your IM client), and blogging/notifications via SMS.

I’ve looked into various SMS gateways, but they do cost money, and while I’m not averse to spending money, I only really want to do so if I know people are going to benefit. Currently, Mudaba is set up to attempt to use the free gateways provided by Vodacom and MTN, but I have a Vodacom number that Vodacom itself doesn’t recognise, so I can’t test it properly - and in this case, you wouldn’t be able to send messages back to Mudaba at all.

Anyway. Try it out, let me know what you think, and if you reckon it’ll be useful at all. I understand that one of the things that make people reluctant to use anything other than Twitter is because of their massive followings - in that case, may I recommend a fresh start? :)

Mudaba can also talk to Twhirl, but I don’t know of any other AIR apps that can speak to Laconica servers - if you know of any, please share.

Feedback, as always, is much appreciated :)