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

There is a lot of local activity currently on a Facebook application soft-launched by startup Praized late last friday.

The application allows you to vote up (dubbed “praize”) and vote down (”raze”) local shops and places. Since the vast majority of the application’s users are in Montréal, we’ve got then on the homepage the most popular places in the city, such as la S.A.T (home to barcamps, unconferences, and other community events such as Pecha Kucha Montreal) or Station-C, a coworking place favorited by the local digerati. The application has also data from all north American cities, if you want to try it out.

The application in itself is very sticky since the landing page lists the activity streams of users, creating a network effect; pushing you to also praize, comment or favorite those places. This makes praizing more interesting, compared to previous tries. Another new social feature is a points-based reputation system, with a view used as a leaderboard.

So far, I like the application, although I’m still not sure on its objective, whether it’s meant for entertainment or as a useful application. Successful Facebook applications I’ve seen so far are the one that have a strong playing component. Take the example of Movies by Flixster, which could have taken the usefulness path (what are the most praized movies), but have chosen instead to do viral quizzes.

In this case, I’m still left wondering after a while what I should do next — continue praizing around or if there was something special I ought to do.

There was a “aha!” moment though. Try searching for a generic place (such as pizzeria, greek restaurant, bakery etc.) and it will list for you the most praized places.

Which is great because it solves the never-ending question of where to hang out with your friend(s). Try thinking about all the times where you want to invite someone to a special place; and most of the times, you’re left browsing pages after pages of various local directories. Websites like yelp already does social recommendations, but this is even more powerful since the people praizing the places are your actual friends. Thinking about it, it would be even more interesting if it sorts places according to my Facebook friends tastes, or if we can see directly friends who praized it, without having to go the place’s page.

Datalicious is a relatively new company in Montreal started by Sébastien Pierre. As stated in the company’s homepage, it focuses on creating optimized interfaces for data visualization.

Sébastien Pierre is a newcomer from Belgium and France, having started there a small software R&D company named ivy.fr. He is known for the revealicious project (demo also avalaible on datalicious), which grabbed a lot of buzz a few years ago.

Now, MontrealTechWatch don’t usually cover service providers; however since MTW’s main focus is “Technology and Innovation”, I think the company fits here. Datalicious uses a wide range of open source technologies, as well as public APIs to create new user interfaces, and seems to excel on both fields. It’s an approach I haven’t yet seen in Montréal, and brings fresh ideas that I hope will initiate and inspire local great projects.

I especially like the craftsmanship & attention to detail that can be seen in the website and projects like revealicious.

PS: ok, I just re-read the post, and it seems like blatant advertising. No, I was not paid for this post :-)  But still, I like datalicious’ approach.

Control Yourself, Inc. has launched officially today Identi.ca, an open microbloggling service that takes a radical approach on how new social web services should be built and used.

Identi.ca is Evan Prodromou’s take on current SaaS and web applications practices. He writes in great detail about identi.ca’s inception in a blog post today. He writes for instance about walled gardens, mentionning how web companies such as Google or Yahoo are accustomed to suck in your data and history, and how most of them don’t allow data portability between different services.

Identi.ca in itself is a service similar to Twitter, in the sense that you use it to tell your network of “friends” about your current activity. The beauty of the system though lies with laconi.ca, a AGPL‘d software that anyone can install on their own servers. Once setup, you can exchange data friend updates with other laconi.ca servers.

If you sit back a while and think about the concept, it solves many problems. It’s for instance an immediate solution to Twitter’s scalability problems — the flow of activity streams are now handled by the users’ servers and not by one single and monolithic web company. It also allows users to customize, add, improve their own version of laconi.ca, opening new ways to use the service, for those who want more security, more flexibility or maybe an in-house closed version.

I foresee laconi.ca as the wordpress of microblogging platforms but in many ways, better. It’s also the only service I know of that has implemented OAuth with a new microblogging standards named OpenedMicroBlogging, used by laconi.ca to authenticate and publish updates to other connected servers. I haven’t myself tried out laconi.ca; as I am still trying to understand the ins and outs of OAuth. Anyways, it’s great to see such innovation, and congrats to Evan!

There is a meeting open to all tomorrow regarding bill C-61. The bill is viewed by many as an abuse, which was solely submitted because of lobbying from the US music and cinema industry, as well as media groups in Canada; while the MPs who submitted it said that it’s a necessary upgrade to Canadian law.

The meeting takes place at Station C, 5369 bvd St-Laurent, suite 430, from 6.00pm; and aims at organizing citizen actions locally, campaigns and brainstorming next steps. The movement was started by Evan Prodromou (also well known for its various wiki projects and support of new and open practices such as Creative Commons), and we already had a first meetup last thursday, with 20+ people coming to discuss the Bill’s details.

I encourage anyone to come there and participate as Bill C-61 will have many consequences in the future, in the way you will enjoy music or any digital media. Personally, my opinion is that artists and authors should have the ultimate word and should be able, on an individual basis, to formulate what rights&obligations users have when they consume their work. If the artist state that nobody should be able to copy or reproduce his/her work, or if there’s no limitations when purchasing their work, then it’s ok with me — but in any case, I don’t think it’s the government’s role to decide on an universal basis what users can or cannot do with digital media. This might suprise you, but hey, it’s a personal opinion.

I mentionned a while ago that MTW would be transitionning to a full-team of bloggers, and many more UI improvements.

At that time, the motivation came from the meetup at Laika, where many suggested that it’s one of the main ways that could make MTW sustainable and become a long-lasting actor in the Montreal Tech landscape.

I couldn’t mention it back then, but one of my inspiration was GamersGlobal, an european video games website. They’ve got a publishing system where every reader is invited to register an account. Readers can then write content and edit articles, with valuable users getting higher ranks. Here is their pitch:

Do you want to do more than just read news or articles about games? Then join the GamersGlobal community today and grow from “User” to “Editor”! Together with our professional journalists, you’ll be part of an accurate, high-quality, up-to-date gaming website. It’s easy, it’s free, it’s fun

The beauty of the system is that they’ve created a community where they get both quality and quantity, original content, with a solid user base, with sections like “New” gathering contributions by users, “Special” which gets contributions by the editorial staff, Top and Hot which are variations on most commented/most viewed articles.

I’ve discussed with quite some time with the technology team of GamersGlobal. They were using Drupal with customized modules, and MTW could get the same CMS, which then solved the problem I raised. But the discussion ended and another completely different system is coming.

So what’s not to like with GamersGlobal’s CMS? Well:

• MTW would then need a Drupal technology team and commit to it. I don’t have anything against Drupal, but it’s a software I have no experience in
• MTW would turn into a pure media outlet, where the only prospects for revenues are advertising. As everyone knows, it’s an industry that is getting hit hard these days, so that wasn’t a good bet. I also don’t like the idea of pushing pageviews up, and the idea that you only get substantial revenues for millions of pageview …
• I think MTW’s real value is not in the content, but in the community that was created around the website. The website gathers tech entrepreners, developers, industry experts, even investors, and I thought there was something to do about it

Talking and meeting technology people from Montreal since MTW came up, I also knew there were consistent problems in Montreal that makes it very difficult to be an entrepreneur:

• It’s very hard to find co-founders or partners for a project, and there is no place yet that solves this problem,
• Finding people to work on your project is also difficult
• Most of the early adopters and experienced entrepreneurs get into the “loop” after a while (going to events that matters, knowing what’s important in Montreal, getting on twitter or other websites to stay in touch with others …) but for newcomers, e.g. for students, the path is daunting. I’d even say, there isn’t even a clear path if you are a technology enthusiast in Montreal,
• Part of the problem in Montreal is that the density of people interested in technology and entrepreneurship is so low that it’s very easy to loose “faith”. You either move to Northern California or just do something else. I believe in places like Montreal, or for that matter in all cities that are NOT Silicon Valley or Boston, you need a central place to get like-minded people connected, share projects, get feedback, and keep the energy high, etc.

The upcoming system for MTW aims to solve all of the forementionned problems. In case you haven’t read between the lines, it’s a mix between Wordpress, digg and Facebook (well it’s more like Facebook than Wordpress). I’ve shown an early preview of the system to a few “stakeholders” (the same people that would use the system) and the reaction has been very good. There is also very good prospects in making it a business — and more importantly making it a platform where everybody wins and where we’d get a place that supports technology enthusiasts, like a virtual Silicon Valley, making the need of starting a technology venture in the Valley irrelevant. Potentially, the system could also be extended in other cities, but that’s a completely different story.

So that’s the explanation why MTW wasn’t updated for the past weeks, and probably for the week to come too. Thanks to keeping up with the website!

Editor’s Note: This is a feature article from Alistair Croll, from rednod and bitcurrent. He has extensive executive experience in marketing and operations and is now launching rednod, a “startup accelerator”. Alistair Croll also provided us helpful advice for Blitzweekend; and writes for webware and gigaom.

Web sites matter. And the previously thankless job of web operations is getting more visibility.

O’Reilly called operations the secret sauce of many companies. Which is weird, because a few short years ago, web operators didn’t even know what to call themselves. They were the guy who knew how the load-balancer worked, living in that weird space between web design and networking. They wrote scripts, and understood BGP. But as designers and marketers, we took web operations for granted.

No more. As soon as an app goes live, it needs operating. A few high-profile failures have shown the world that reliable, scaleable websites take good architecture, reliable infrastructure, and constant vigilance. Allen Lewind wrote that “Failing to do so will inevitably cost these companies users, performance and money.”

Operations is also in transition. With cloud computing and on-demand hosting, much of the equipment is out of our hands. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do; on the contrary, operators now need to keep tabs on their managed hosters and virtual machines. So whether you’re a “server hugger” or have all your stuff in the cloud, you need to worry about web operations.

Montreal-based Bitcurrent is a loose federation of analysts and technology pundits that look at the challenges of web operations. Several of the organization’s partners built the underlying components that make the Internet run today; others have built out some of the world’s biggest web applications.

And we want your help. We’re conducting a survey of Web Operations, trying to understand the challenges and trends web operators face.

If you run a web application, head over to Bitcurrent and take the survey. You can respond anonymously if you like. Tell your friends to respond. Spread the word.

In return, you’ll get access to Bitcurrent’s forthcoming report, The State of Web Operations. Plus, in conjunction with MTW, we’re giving away a free pass to the Bitnorth conference that’s happening in September to a random survey respondent. Fill out the survey and you’re automatically entered in the draw.

Standoutjobs has won the SEOmoz web2.0 award in the employement and jobs category. Nominees in the category were judged on usability, usefulness, social aspects, user interface & design, and content quality. In all of these criterias, Standoutjobs was ranked ahead of careerbuilder.com and monster, which is a feat, since these last two are 2 heavyweights compared to Standoutjobs, which has just launched earlier this year.

The SEOmoz web2.0 awards is an annual (virtual) event, where nominees are submitted on SEOmoz’s website, with winners chosen by a shortlist of bloggers, entrepreneurs and “business people”. SEOmoz in itself is a search engine optimization consulting company, which may raise potential conflict interests and the question of the impartiality. However, SEOmoz has been a leader in innovation and has during the past years giving back a lot to their “community”, with their actions having impact far beyond seo circles. I credit for instance the company of having validated SEO as a respected profession & trade that will make a difference for your website, through their works, articles and evangelization.

Furthermore, unlike other Internet awards, this award focuses on web2.0 and websites that are trying specifically to leverage user-generated content and new technologies such as using the web as a platform. I think Standoutjobs deserves 100% the award and this should encourage them to make an even better job - i.e. revolutionize the job & online recruiting space :)

Recently, Standoutjobs was also seen as Canada’s Top 20 most innovative company at the CIX. They have also announced new innovative features such as the use of iPaper to handle documents directly in the browser.

Congrats then to Standoutjobs! Great job!

I am reading a post on Techcrunch about Mediascrape, a local media startup, that made news recently. Michael Arrington reveals that Tyler Cavell, founder of the company, is threatning him of a lawsuit, since the latter found the post and comments about his company incorrect.

I am not really sure what to think about the case. Threatning a blogger of a lawsuit is frivolous and reveals a big misunderstanding of blogs. Roberto Rocha once called Tyler “one of the most refreshingly candid company chiefs I know”; and it seems he still plays the same character. On the other hand, Techcrunch bloggers are making quick and easy assumptions based on what they see on the website’s homepage, while they are thousands of miles away from the company; fact is that there were reasons behind every criticism they threw at Mediascrape.

One thing is for sure, this is all very stupid; and diverts everyone from what Mediascrape really does. I guess I could try to defend Tyler Cavell in the comments sections (which bash Québec and Canada by the way); but the guy has never participated or went in any tech/network event around here. It’s the sort of person you have no clue what they are doing or thinking, and finish concluding that maybe they think they are better on their own. Heck, I am not even sure he’ll appreciate the support.

So, to any aspiring entrepreneur out there: network, connect, share, learn. Then iterate. Don’t do like the Capazoo or the Mediascrape by staying in your corner. Meet other entrepreneurs in the same space as yours. Go to the 5 à 7. Share what you are doing, and get to know what works out there. Go to the techbreakfasts. Go to conferences. It’s such a business 101 principle that I can’t even believe I am writing it here.

Tourisme Montréal unveiled today a new version of their website, with a focus on slick videos and an innovative user interface.

I see the logic on producing videos, the featured video here certainly gives Montréal a modern/european/vibrant look. But I find the whole idea wrong on many levels.

There are lots to be said about the flash interface, which is reminiscent of the late 90’s era, when “designers” who felt much smarter than the rest of the population wanted to create their own user interface. But those user interfaces actually break people’s expectations and pretty much everything else. Here is one example how they broke the navigation at Tourisme Montréal:

It sucks to use flash for the user interface; for accessibility, usability, seo, and so many other reasons.

But my biggest concern is that the project is reported to cost Tourisme Montréal $1.5million, with the project work awarded to Sid Lee and Cactus. I can’t help thinking that the management team at Tourisme Montréal must have missed the train about user-generated content. We are in an era where everyone and their dogneighbor are gladly taking pictures and videos, remixing content, sometimes doing (very) stupid work, and sometimes producing gems with a quality beyond what you can get with a profesionnal design agency.

Compare this for instance to the Montréal network of public librairies which held a simple contest, asking Montréalers to send their own videos how they like librairies. (from fagstein) Here is the video that won the contest

I find this video as powerful as the one produced by Sid Lee; the main difference being that it didn’t cost the libraries a cent. And it isn’t the only good video, 93 other videos were submitted, uploaded to Youtube, and will certainly have a much greater impact on the long term than one proprietary non-embeddable video with fancy buttons.

For $1.5m, I can you list 10 other wonderful projects that could have been done, with a much better roi. But hey, I guess digital artists have to live.