Over at my personal site I posted about a project that is a core philosophy of the Fabricatorz team. We build free network services. That doesn't mean we give away client's data or property, but we use free and open source software to make successful projects. Its a decision we made, and it sets us apart from other labs and shops that are more like blackwater for development.

Check out the Autonomo.us Project. Fabricatorz friend MRAY designed the super-statue-of-liberty-esque logo.

As announced at the StatusNet blog, on Sunday, July 18th, Status.Net, Google Buzz, Diaspora, GNU Social, DiSo, BuddyPress, Dreamwidth, Onesocialweb, and others will be meeting in Portland Oregon for a Federated Social Web Summit, a one-day summit by those implementors working on building the federated social web. This means building upon open web protocols that allow for various web projects to interoperate. We will be addressing current implementations, successes and incompatibilities between services, as well as the future and how to implement it.

This conference will be around the same time as the Community Leadership Summit in Portland as well as OSCON.

To find out more details see here.

There are so many people in town and so little time! With our CEO, Evan Prodromou here for a couple of weeks and all the Pre-Chirp and Chizzurp excitement, all of us in the SF StatusCrew decided we needed some face2face hacking and a StatusCheck, VIP style.

This Friday, April 16, we invite you to our new San Francisco Office at Awesome Jar from 2 - 6 PM to hack with us. That's right! Its a (FREE and OPEN) StatusNet Hackfest that will segue into a StatusCheck drink meetup in the VIP at the Cigar Bar nearby from 6 PM until at least 8 PM.

Since our software, the StatusNet Server Software is Free and Open Source Software, we have an Open Twitter compatible API, and since we track our bugs, features, and code out in the open, its simple to hack on StatusNet's code. Come on Friday and work directly with @evan, @zach, @nate, and @rejon who will all be hacking up a storm. To all Twitter developers in town, come on over and lets get StatusNet support added to your hard work.

Hackfest Priorities

Setup Your Own http://status.net (anyone who contributes here, contact us!)
SpreadStatusNet (help spread the love!)
Make Themes
Add OStatus Support to Your Project
Develop Plugins (quick list to implement Supported Networks)
Translate StatusNet Software
Do a Novice Task

StatusNet Hackfest, 2-6 PM. Friday, April 16
AwesomeJar
615 Sansome Street #300
San Francisco, CA 94111
TEL 415-692-5271

StatusCheck Meetup, 6-8 PM
Cigar Bar
850 Montgomery Street
San Francisco, CA 94133

Map of both locations

Until then, please Sign-up to StatusNet Cloud Service and download the latest StatusNet Server code. See you on Friday!

San Jose, CA, 1 April 2010 -- In his keynote address at the Where 2.0 Conference, StatusNet CEO Evan Prodromou launched the company's new location-based service, Foursqualor.com. Said Prodromou, "Location-based services are a disruptive technology that are setting the Web on fire. Fire as hot as a thousand suns! And we want a piece of that action."

"So, we're copying the most popular location services and making our own. Foursqualor combines the exciting gameplay of Foursquare with the other things that Gowalla has that make it different in ways that we can't exactly put our finger on. Brown? Is that it?"
Based on the award-winning StatusNet social messaging server, Foursqualor lets digerati prove that they have very smart phones on a regular basis. "It's like a game that has a button!" says Robert Scoble, Foursqualor early adopter. "I click the button and everyone knows where I am! And it's easy: one big button."

Foursqualor also features loads of graphics from http://openclipart.org including the kid with a ball, aka the foursqueeler.

StatusNet hopes to bring together the free-as-in-freedom Free and Open Source Software community with the free-as-in-free-beer-because-I'm-the-mayor location-based moocher community to make a free-as-in-freaky all-out freedom orgy. "StatusNet has always been about freedom, and if social media is going to involve a lot of free beer, we want to be part of that and provide a more open solution. Anyone can run their own StatusNet instance so anyone can instantly become 'the mayor' of their favorite bar by installing a plugin or two," he added.

Fabricatorz developer Jon Phillips invaded Austin Texas, with members of StatusNet, for the annual group of interactive art, film, & music festivals known as South by Southwest (SXSW).

During the panel "Can you copyright a tweet?," Jon, Evan Prodromou, Fred Benenson, and Wendy Seltzer each spoke about aspects of micro-blogging including character limits. Have a look at Jon's presentation slide show below:

Post-SXSW, LibrePlanet kicked off, in Boston, where Free Network Service advocates converged. Jon said this of his time at the conference:

the hottest topic for StatusNet and myself were the sessions by Luis Villa, Bradley Kuhn, Mako, and Matt Lee on Free Network Services. We at StatusNet are big believers in Free Network Services. Please check out http://autonomo.us if you are interested in this topic.

If all this isn't enough content to rock an open source/micro-blogging/free software nut's world, another Fabricatorz developer, Brad Phillips, has created the following StatusNet-related badges for anyone to use and remix!

Any OStatus advocates should feel free to use these additional badges:

Visit the StatusNet Wiki to view and utilize many more related graphics created by members of Fabricatorz and others in the community.