I’ve been investigating what it would take to build a website with functionality similar to Twitter (aka MicroBlogging).

Turns out there are a lot of open source options available, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.  Let’s go over them one-by-one, shall we?

Laconica

Let’s start up with the big one.  Laconica is the engine that powers the popular identi.ca microblog service.

Provides, essentially, everything you can get with Twitter… plus it’s under active development.  (According to the project plan image and video notices are under development.)

Has a plug-in architecture, though not a ton of plugins available yet.  Setup is simple if you’re comfortable with Apache/PHP/MySQL.

All things considered, I don’t hesitate to recommend Laconica if you’re looking to host your own microblogging site.

That said, there are a lot of other (rather fantastic) options available…

Open Micro Blogger

A very young project, but has much potential.  Adheres to the Open Micro Blogging standard (as does Laconica).

Has support for image/sound/video notices (though it is very early support).

This one’s not really in a production worthy state yet, but keep an eye on it.

WordPress + Prologue

WordPress is a rockstar when it comes to blogging software.  Prologue is simply a WordPress theme… which adds Microblogging.

And, if you check out the demo on the Prologue page, you’ll notice it pulls this off incredibly well.

It’s not incredibly feature rich (in terms of micro-blogging) but, since it is just a WordPress theme, you can utilize a lot of existing WordPress plugins with a little hackery magic.

How well it would scale is a good question.  But this may be a great sollution for small teams and communities (especially ones already using WordPress).

BuddyPress

BuddyPress is much, much more than a Twitter clone.

It is, essentially, a collection of plugins that allow you to take a WordPress MU (a modified WordPress that allows you to have multiple users host multiple blogs) installation and turn it into more of a… well… FaceBook clone.

Installation is incredibly simple (once you have WordPress MU installed).

Features private messaging, groups, a “Wall” like feature, forums… all sorts of stuff.  If you’re looking to build a large scale social network… this is an incredible place to start.

JaikuEngine

Jaiku.com, a great micr-blogging site, was purchased by Google.  And, now, the engine that powers it is open source and runs on Google’s App Engine.

Which one of these projects to use depends entirely on your needs.  Need a large-scale (tons and tons of users) twitter like site?  Go with Laconica.  Need to add microblogging to a small company blog?  Go Prologue.

Have a personal favorite open source microblogging / social networking project?  Leave the info in the comments here.