Identi.ca – Open Source Microblogging

You know everything you hate about twitter? Downtime, walled garden, some very poor design in places, etc.

Well a solution launched today that seems to be technically superior in every way, but is going to be facing a tough battle ahead to attract users and get them talking.

Identi.ca is a new open source project to build a better twitter. The actual open source project is called Laconi.ca, and it has been created by Evan Prodromou in Montreal who also founded Certifi.ca and Wikitravel (one of my favorite websites).

When you first see this project it is easy to write it off as a mere attempt to knock twitter off it’s throne, but I don’t see it that way. By releaseing Laconi.ca as an open-source project, Evan is betting (I think) on building out the sort of long-tail of microblogging. Charlottetown based SportsTwit is an example of niche microblogging that I think has a real chance of catching on (and should consider switching to the Laconi.ca platform).

The introduction of Laconi.ca brings microblogging from being a closed and proprietary world in to a more mass market tool in the same way that blogging is no longer just Blogger, but is instead a medium.

By using open standards like FOAF and others, different sites running Laconi.ca can talk to eachother and federate data. That means that if you are on a niche site, say startupnorth-tweets.com, you can interact with people on Identi.ca, and they have full access to your profile and other information. This is one of the core weaknesses of Twitter, its inability to federate out some of the load.

Good luck Evan, I have a feeling this is the start of something great, and a change that had to happen.

You can find me here: http://identi.ca/jevon

Lessons in Social Media, with MediaScrape

We have covered MediaScrape a few times, and when I joked that they might be the next Capazoo, their CEO came through with a great reference to Cocain.

Well, they are back. Since this post is not an opinion piece, I will just link you to a recent Montreal Gazette article and quote a few bits. In the interest of presenting the other side of the startup-ecosystem argument, I present the one… the only…

He’d rather make deals with media conglomerates and Silicon Valley giants over fancy lunches than share ideas over blogs or hobnob with venture capitalists at technology happy hours.

He doesn’t go to local networking events where entrepreneurs talk about their projects and share feedback:
“Why would I go? There’s no money – there’s no content at those things. I’m busy. I’m making deals. And the times I did go I just heard a lot of whining that there’s no money in Montreal.”
He doesn’t have a blog where he logs his company’s progress, details its challenges, and invites dialog from the tech community, in the hopes of increasing his Google cred:
“I don’t need to be a destination site. For us to use social media gimmicks, to drive traffic to our site would put us as competitors with our clients.
“We’re a behind-the-scenes enabler.”

Yet this hardly seems to faze Cavell. He doesn’t feel he needs to satisfy doubting bloggers.
“Screw them,” he said. “We’re a private company. I don’t have to tell them shit.
“Blogs are great for open-source editorials, but they’re no substitute for researched journalism.”
One could chalk up Cavell’s philosophy to his lineage. He’s the son of Charles Cavell, the former head of what is today Quebecor World Inc., when it was still a mighty printer, and former chairman of tabloid chain Sun Media Corp.

An in case you are wondering, yes: Comments are turned on.

Pride and Prejudice – Why startups need community

I was feeling extraordinarily proud of Idée last night when I saw that they received glowing coverage on TechCrunch. It is well deserved, and it seems like they are just getting started in terms of press coverage. They recently had a huge profile in the Financial Post, written by David George-Cosh (who has been getting more and more connected with the Toronto community as of late). We have been tracking Idée for a while now.

Then as I kept flipping through my news feeds, I came across an embarrassing update about MediaScrape, which Heri and Mathew Ingram both covered well. When we first posted about MediaScrape, Tyler Cavell, the founder, responded in a much more succinct way than he did to TechCrunch’s latest post. Heri had even convinced me to lay off and see how things work out.

I almost feel like I am doing Idée a disservice by mentioning them in the same post as MediaScrape. Where Idée has focused on perfecting their technology and winning customers, MediaScrape seems to be prone to distraction and tends to make simple matters much more confusing and difficult than necessary.

Heri made the point in his post yesterday that when entrepreneurs are disconnected from their local community, they seem to be more likely to go off the rails. I think Heri is on to something that investors need to take in to consideration when investing.

Again, Leila and the crew at Idée are a great contrast and example of how to do things right. While Idée is possibly the busiest startup in Canada, and one that is spending its own money (ie: they have no time to waste), they still manage to be tightly connected to the community here in Toronto. Leila is constantly organizing, co-organizing or speaking at events, and when she isn’t doing that, she spends a lot of time each week mentoring other startups.

Capazoo and MediaScrape, according to Heri, have never made it out to a single Montreal event and have generally kept a distance from their local startup community.

Perhaps one of the measures that investors, both Angels and VCs, take in to account when deciding whether they want to put money in to a startup or an entrepreneur should be whether or not that person has been able to take the time to connect with a community of startups. That way you know they have a social and professional circle that will keep them accountable, demand progress and that will criticize their execution, rather than patting them on the back and telling them they are going to be rich.

If your friends tell you that you will be rich and famous, then you have the wrong friends.