OStatus is an open standard

Open standard

An open standard is a standard that is publicly available and has various rights to use associated with it, and may also have various properties of how it was designed . There is no single definition and interpretations vary with usage....

 for distributed status updates that references a suite of open protocols including Atom

Atom (standard)

The name Atom applies to a pair of related standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.Web feeds allow software programs to check for updates published on a...

, Activity Streams

Activity Streams

Activity Streams is an open format specification for activity stream protocols, which are used to syndicate activities taken in social web applications and services, similar to those in Facebook's Newsfeed, FriendFeed, the Movable Type Action Streams plugin, etc.Implementors of the activity...

, PubSubHubbub, Salmon

Salmon (protocol)

The Salmon Protocol is a message exchange protocol running over HTTP designed to decentralize commentary and annotations made against newsfeed articles such as blog posts. It allows a single discussion thread to be established between the article's origin and any feed reader or "aggregator" which...

, Webfinger

Webfinger

WebFinger is an Internet protocol that aims to identify people by their E-mail addresses. It is an extension of the Finger protocol used by the unix finger utility to identify users of a particular computer in a network...

, that allows different messaging hubs to route status updates between users in near real-time.

OStatus federation was first possible between StatusNet installations, and later between StatusNet and MiniMe. Various other content management systems are still incomplete in their compliance to the full standard.

See also

• OpenMicroBlogging
  OpenMicroBlogging
  OpenMicroBlogging is an open protocol that allows different microblogging services to inter-operate. It lets the user of one service subscribe to notices by a user of another service. This enables a federation of new communities, as potentially an organization of any size can host a service...
  
   - older federated microblogging specification used by Identi.ca
  Identi.ca
  identi.ca is an open source social networking and micro-blogging service. Based on StatusNet, a micro-blogging software package built on the OpenMicroBlogging specification, Identi.ca allows users to send text updates up to 140 characters long...
  
  and others, to be superseded by OStatus.