On the SitePoint Web Tech blog Raena Jackson-Armitage has a recent post on a few tools that you can use to mimic some of the functionality Twitter offers (three of them) with applications that already exist.

If you're anything like me, you've already wondered how easy it would be to make your own—perhaps you'd like to set up a microblog for you and your colleagues to share links and have discussions. [...] Today we’ll look at three new solutions that are easy to set up, have reasonably modest hosting requirements, and even include some features that blow Twitter out of the water.

They suggest three tools:

• the P2 plugin for WordPress
• the Motion plugin for Movable Type
• Laconica (the platform that Identica runs on, a full Twitter clone with other added features)

Each of these comes with a description of installation, features offered and use.

Paul Jones has taken a look at some performance statistics that Rasmus Lerdorf shared in a recent presentation from some of his tests.

It was with some interest, then, that I viewed Rasmus Lerdorf's slides on the subject of performance benchmarking. I'm beginning to think there's something unexpected or unexamined in his testing methodology.

Paul compares some of his statistics (gathered from his testing) to those of Rasmus and finds a few places where things don't quite match up - specifically in the default overhead that seems to be a part of Rasmus' stats. Paul goes on to look at EC2 as a cause to the problems but ends up without much of a confirmed answer.