ABC News Radio launches abcnewsradio.fm on the StatusNet cloud

I'm personally excited to note that one of my favorite projects in development on the StatusNet Cloud is now open for public use.  abcnewsradio.fm is the microblogging service of ABC News Radio, one of the most trusted sources for news and information in the US. The launch of abcnewsradio.fm means that listeners and fans will be able to get information from the service over multiple channels, including the federated social web.

Dan Patterson, digital platform manager for ABC News Radio, laid out the explanation for their use of StatusNet in the ABC News Radio blog: 

As the web continues to change traditional media, we see two different and equally strong paradigms emerging.  The emergence of sites like Twitter, Tumblr and the social web has been mirrored and tempered by the growing prominence of closed systems like the App Store and Facebook.  Now, we like and use all of these platforms. 

But we think it's equally important for brands and individuals to control their content and interactive experience with the social graph (Fail Whale, anyone?).  To that end StatusNet provides a glimpse at the future of a distributed internet.

We at StatusNet also think that our platform provides a way for media companies and brands to control content and experience without losing access to their social media audiences. I hope as we move forward with the abcnewsradio.fm, we'll continue to help each other develop this medium.

There's further coverage and commentary on ReadWriteWeb ("ABC "Unofficially" Partners with Twitter-Alternative StatusNet") and the New York Observer ("ABC Partners With StatusNet to Avoid Twitter's Fail Whale").

Thanks to everyone who's worked on this project, including the StatusNet dev team who've been stomping bugs (with more to do, as Dan points out in his blog post...) to make this launch possible.