The advantage to using a Laconica based system is that you can set up your own server for your group of people to ‘dent’ (same as a ‘tweet’) back and forth within a private group or company without those notices going out to the entire internet. Alternatively you can have a public group set up a server and use your own domain name and users and tie into any other public laconica system, such as Identica. Using a distributed system like this if any one site goes down you’re still tied into the rest of your friends. During the downtimes of Twitter no one can talk to anyone else on the system.

And if you’re looking for Open Source enthusiasts they are in the majority of users on the Identica site. So point your browser to http://identi.ca to get a peek at the site and if you want to follow someone there a good choice to start with would be http://identi.ca/chuck

If you’re interested in trying Sugar-on-a-Stick (SoaS) at HCL, we’d love to help. Most of the pilots so far have either been within schools or completely independently (gatherings of interested parents and kids) – it would be great to see what kids would do with it in a library. Because a library is already this playground for learning in (you don’t have to worry about teaching them how to pass standardized tests and such) it might actually be even easier to do the kind of exploration Sugar was designed for.