Faq

These are some Frequently Asked Questions about this service, with some answers.

What is Pet Status?

Pet Status is a micro-blogging service. You can use it to write short notices about yourself, where you are, and what you're doing, and those notices will be sent to all your friends and fans.

How is Pet Status different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others?

Pet Status is an Open Network Service. Our main goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users' autonomy. In particular, all the software used for Pet Status is Free Software, and all the data is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services that can receive your notices.

The goal here is autonomy -- you deserve the right to manage your own on-line presence. If you don't like how Pet Status works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

Where is feature X?

The software we run, StatusNet, is still in its early stages, and many features people expect from microblogging sites are not yet implemented. Some important ones that are expected "soon":

  • More AJAX-y interface
  • Maps
  • Cross-post to Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
  • Pull messages from Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc.
  • Facebook integration
  • Image, video, audio notices

There is a list of bugs and features that you may find interesting. New ideas or complaints are very welcome.