Montreal Tech Watch

In a blog post listing all the technical features, Evan Prodromou is revealing the next big step for identi.ca and the laconi.ca microbblogging software, which is to offer a paid hosted instances of the laconica software at status.net.

In the same way that organizations around the world now uses communication software such as email or instant messenging, status.net would provide employees a way to micro-blog their work activities, either privately, or publicly, depending on the preferences.

Laconi.ca has already groups, private messenging, tags, which means that a running instance could be used as an intranet.

The service competes with yammer, present.ly; and in a way, it also competes against backpack, now branded by 37Signals as the next-generation intranet software. The main selling point for laconi.ca though is that it’s Free Software, and also builds on Creative Commons licenses. This means that companies won’t get their key data held “in hostage” by a third-party provider, and this also means they can participate in the software development process, if there are any bugs or lacking features, a more interesting proposition than paying for yammer and then getting “nothing” in return, in case you stop using the service, or if the provider ceases its business.

Of course, identi.ca has also a key advantage, since it designed the open micro blogging standard, which offers a standard for different micro-blogging software to communicate and inter-operate freely.

My conclusion in the previous review of identi.ca was that it could be next WordPress (see also this). In the meantime, Twitter has dashed full speed ahead, and it seems all other micro-blogging software decided to go for the corporate world. So it seems WordPress won’t be the model, but rather software like SugarCRM or Red Hat. I assume Evan and the Control Yourself is now designing support options as well as a sales strategy.