Hi,
I'm one of the Googlers working on JaikuEngine in my 20% time (BTW JaikuEngine is to Jaiku as Chromium is to Chrome) and I just wanted to add a few things.
Firstly either Laconica or JaikuEngine would make an excellent choice. They're both open source and they're both built by teams who believe in the idea of lots of small microblogs that can talk to each other rather than everybody using one massive microblogging platform.
Laconica is further ahead in terms of federation at the moment and has an active development community.
JaikuEngine also has an active development community but has only recently been open-sourced.
However the code runs on Google AppEngine. This means setting up your own instance takes less than 5 minutes. You don't need your own hosting. You don't have to pay any money for hosting unless you get enough traffic that you go over AppEngine's free quota: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html
Jaiku.com currently does have support for XMPP but JaikuEngine doesn't. That code will be open sourced when AppEngine publicly launches it's XMPP API: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html
Thanks for a detailed response. A couple of quick questions
Is there any plan to support the twitter API for now so there is no need for an separate client?
Is there a timeframe for support for XMPP & federation? They seem a while away.
To us federation is not as important as XMPP.
Also Are there any migration tools available? Just in case things don't pan out well.
We don't have any current plans to support the Twitter API. That's just because no-one's asked for it. We'd have no objections if someone filed a feature request on our issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/issues/list or sent us a patch to add Twitter API support.
We also have our own API which is supported by a few apps.
Open sourcing the XMPP support is dependent on the AppEngine team's release of the XMPP API. However their roadmap: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html says they'll be launching XMPP support sometime before the end of June 2009.
We don't currently have any migration tools although the JaikuEngine API exposes the complete history of every post a user has made and so does the website. It should be relatively simple for a user extract all of their data out of any JaikuEngine instance. We'd like to make this even easier but we're still thinking about the most user-friendly way to do this.
In general my advice is that you sign up to both Identi.ca and Jaiku.com (as they're the single biggest instances of both Laconica and JaikuEngine) to get a feel for how the two systems work. Not only will this give you an understanding of how they compare to each other but you'll see how they differ from Twitter and be able to interact with the respective development teams.
Firstly either Laconica or JaikuEngine would make an excellent choice. They're both open source and they're both built by teams who believe in the idea of lots of small microblogs that can talk to each other rather than everybody using one massive microblogging platform.
Laconica is further ahead in terms of federation at the moment and has an active development community.
JaikuEngine also has an active development community but has only recently been open-sourced.
However the code runs on Google AppEngine. This means setting up your own instance takes less than 5 minutes. You don't need your own hosting. You don't have to pay any money for hosting unless you get enough traffic that you go over AppEngine's free quota: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html
As Evan's pointed out JaikuEngine doesn't currently support OMB but we are planning to do it. See this document for our plan: http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/source/browse/trunk/doc...
Jaiku.com currently does have support for XMPP but JaikuEngine doesn't. That code will be open sourced when AppEngine publicly launches it's XMPP API: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html
JaikuEngine's project page is here: http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/
We have a mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/jaikuengine-discuss but most of the activity takes place on the Jaiku channel here: http://www.jaiku.com/channel/jaikuengine
Our backlog of bugs and feature requests is here: http://code.google.com/p/jaikuengine/issues/list
If you have any questions or need any help then drop by the mailing list or the JaikuEngine channel. We're happy to help in any way we can.
P.S. If you're interested in Open Micro Blogging then you should sign up to the mailing list: http://lists.openmicroblogging.org/mailman/listinfo/omb and help define the next version.