Identi.ca Gets Funding to Take on Twitter

Erik Hersman and I recently had a great phone discussion about the virtues of micro-blogging applications and why Laconi.ca would work well in developing countries. Well the company that makes that leading open-source micro-blogging solution, Identi.ca, has just secured just over $100k USD in start-up capital from Montreal Start Up. This is good news as, Identi.ca is based on code that the founders have open sourced, which will hopefully mean that as Identi.ca improves, so will the Laconi.ca code base.

Founder and CEO of Identi.ca Evan Prodromou says open source gives the company “commercialization options that Twitter doesn’t…I don’t want to be a tiny company where we get paid for 100 percent of the installs, but have a tiny base. I’d much rather see tens of millions of installs, and make conversions off a relatively small percent of them.”

This bodes well for entrepreneurs interested in using the Laconi.ca code to start-up companies for micro-messaging services in countries that are too small (or not profitable enough) for companies like Twitter and Yammer to target.

Essentially, Identi.ca is poising itself to be the Wordpress of micro-blogging. Wordpress, the most popular blogging software, is also open-source allowing users to download it, customize it and run it off their own servers…exactly what Identi.ca has done with their open source software. The largest non-open source, centralized blogging platform is Google’s Blogger.com (ironically created by one of the founders of Twitter). Like Twitter, it’s closed-source and it only runs off the servers of the company that owns it.

In other words, Twitter is to Blogger as Identi.ca is to Wordpress.