There are a few good reasons to use the twitter alternative status.net / identi.ca (formerly laconica). First of all it is an open source plattform. Second one of the main goals of status.net is to let it’s users keep controll of their data. It supports open protocols like XMPP and standards like FOAF to export your data. Copyrighting your posts using creative commons is also integrated. Furthermore you can install your own status.net server.

These arguments convinced me, that using status.net is a good idea. The first thing i missed was a simple widget to display status.net posts on a webpage – unlike twitter, the available javascript widgets are quite few and not very elegant.

Luckily status.net implements a nearly twitter compatible api. So it should be rather easy to use existing twitter widgets with it. My favourite one is jQuery LiveTwitter, as it is clean, simple and robust. It took just a few minutes to fork it on github, add a few lines of code + settings and voilà it displayed identi.ca status messages.

My fork is of course available on github. The only difference to using the original LiveTwitter is an additional option service that expects a status.net hostname. If you leave this option blank, Twitter is used as usual. A quick example could look like this:

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"
src="jquery.livetwitter/jquery.livetwitter.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8">
$(function(){
    $('#target').liveTwitter('test', {service:'identi.ca'});
});
</script>

That would search for the Term test on identi.ca. Any other hostname like youraccount.status.net work as well.

The only thing missing in this extension is a way to use twitter style list queries on status.net. This will be emulated in another commit using status.net’s groups feature.

Update: this extension is now included in the original jQuery live-twitter plugin.