Identi.ca’s perfect launch (0)
This might be too early to rewrite about identi.ca and give a judgement on the webiste’s success; however, there are already new interesting facts about the new service:
- most of the bloggers who covered the event started to mention Twitter and its fail whale, which is now legendary. Evan Prodroumou’s Identi.ca was then seen as the saver of the day. Now the question is, can this be pulled of by any other company? Could you arrange to launch a service when the market leader is experiencing growth problems? This is extremely difficult in my opinion, but nevertheless, Evan managed to do it, and this should be something that should be thought about.
- Most of the reviews of identi.ca mentionned that it was a clone of twitter, and that it lacked features here and there. However, most of those reviews were also enthusiastic, and the vast majority said it was good enough. Actually, identi.ca was beta-tested amongst a small close group during two months, with Evan busy resolving bugs and dealing with rough edges. We saw the introduction of remote subscriptions, OpenId login, replies, the bridging to im and gtalk, etc. If you are developing a website, the lesson here is: release and get feedback early, as it tells you right away what works and what doesn’t.
- Reaching out to communities and opinion leaders. There is a tendency amongst startups to reach directly to big websites like TechCrunch & associates, and also do a parallel push on social media aggregators like digg or reddit. Granted, there was a link submitted to digg; I believe though that what worked was pinging the FLOSS people, people working on the Semantic Web, on Wikis, on Creative Commons, and the tech community in Montreal/Canada. When those communities published a post about identi.ca, such as Dave Winer, big media websites like ReadWrite/Web or The Inquisitr came naturally to the service. I’m sure there is something here that we all can learn from.
- just introduce one simple feature, which was federation of statuses. There are many ways to replicate twitter; Plurk is doing for instance easier conversations, you could also imagine a vast array of new social features that Twitter can’t; but Evan focused on one approach and his take was the most elegant.
So far, identi.ca has already more than 10.000 users, and the laconi.ca sofware is already used by a handful of servers. It’s also the most viral web service I’ve seen in Montreal, and I don’t expect the attention to stop soon.
I know Evan is also considering this as a business, which should be Identi.ca’s next step. With Open Source software though, there are many paths to choose from (see SugarCRM, Zimbra, Magento, or giants like Red Hat and mysql) so I’m not worried about.
Photo: plane taking-off, AtomicShark
