What is known about Statusnet (through Identi.ca) and Twitter is already out there. Everyone or at least almost everyone, knows something about these two entities. Since we live in a world that is now dominated by social networks and that microblogging is just but an aspect of social networking, the Identica and Twitter microblogging services are now well known. Identica runs on the open source Twitter clone Statusnet script. Both services are similar in what they offer to their users with both providing s platform on which users can send short text messages of up to 140 characters. Each offers SMS integration too. But both are quite different in terms of the software that they run on; and the major difference is that you can download the source code of one so as to set up your own microblogging site while you can't do that with the other.

Take the case of Twitter. Twitter runs on  open source software too but the code is  not distributed a la Statusnet. *I have just come to learn that Twitter is built on open-source software too from someone on Mann Connect. Read this on http://twitter.com/about/opensource.*  StatusNet, a downloadable Twitter-clone script,  is absolutely free and open source (FSF/FOSS) software. Yup you read it right; it is absolutely FREE. Actually you can download the latest release from the author’s site and set up your own microblogging service. The source code can be modified but this has to comply with the software's licence conditions. With the open source concept any user of the script can report bugs to the developers by adding it to the bug database.

The Statusnet software also complies with the Open Microblogging Standard. That means you can subscribe to another person’s notices on a different Statusnet site; their posts are simply pushed to your stream. Try it out on this site by simply using the “Remote Subscription” form and then subscribe to another user on this site. It’s like following another tweep on a different Twitter site (if ever there was) and getting their tweeps streaming on your profile page.