Montreal Tech Watch

Last week, MontrealStartup announced a seed investment in ControlYourself.ca, which does laconi.ca & identi.ca

Identi.ca is an open source version of twitter, building on standards and openess, such as the fact that any user can download the software and open up their own laconi.ca instance, which lead me to dub the service as the “wordpress for microblogging”.

Another key advantage is that it’s federated and distributed, meaning that separate instances can still communicate with each other, thanks to the open microblogging standard. While Twitter has been getting a lot of press, identi.ca has also received a lot of press, both from free software/open source/creative commons publications, and also from technology blogs as a solid alternative to Twitter.

Identi.ca is the brainchild of Evan Prodromou, who has under his sleeve wikitravel and vinismo.

The upcoming months will be indeed very exciting to watch. Twitter’s Evan Williams announced they’ve got their business model under way, to be introduced early this year, and Jaiku is also going to enter the open/federated micro-blogging scene, sponsored by Google itself.

Congrats to MSU & the team at ControlYourself!