Identi.ca pushes forward [LWN.net]

July 8, 2009

This article was contributed by Nathan Willis

Identi.ca, the open microblogging site popular with free software advocates, just passed its one-year anniversary — a milestone that happened to roughly coincide with an major upgrade to Laconica, the software package that runs the site. The upgrade brings new functionality to Identi.ca, and lays the groundwork for a new commercial microblogging offering from the free service's creator. The dual commercial and free product lines are an important move for the company, as the free software community seeks business models fit for distributed network services.

Identi.ca is run by Montreal-based Control Yourself. CEO Evan Prodromou chuckles at the term "Twitter clone," but that is how many outsiders refer to the service. The Laconica software implements a Twitter-like web application, and can use the Twitter API to connect to many of the same software applications and third-party services. It has its own, native API, however, based on the Open MicroBlogging (OMB) specification. OMB supports features not found on Twitter (such as groups), and allows federation, meaning a user on any OMB site can subscribe to notices from users on every other OMB site, without the hassle of creating additional accounts.

The 0.8 update to Laconica, codenamed "Shiny Happy People," brought several new features to Identi.ca, including file attachments, page theming, conversation threading, and Facebook support. Behind the scenes, 0.8 adds offline processing of queued messages via Streaming Text Orientated Messaging Protocol (STOMP) queue servers like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ, reducing strain on the database server and making it easier to scale the service up. A statistics package will optionally report non-privacy-invading data (such as the number of users and messages, version number of dependencies, etc.) back to the Laconica project.

Paid service on free software

Although the public got its first taste of Laconica 0.8 when Identi.ca upgraded, others have been testing the code out in private. Control Yourself's paid service Status.net is not yet open for business, but a private group of invited beta testers have been coming online . Status.net offers customers a fully hosted Laconica microblogging service courtesy of their choice of subdomains (e.g., yournickname.status.net). In Prodromou's preview announcement, he listed several facets of Status.net accounts that distinguish it from a personal account at Identi.ca or another free service, including the ability to incorporate advertising, to make the site private for internal or team use only, to integrate the site with other existing sites or user databases, and to change the license terms attached to status updates (by default, Identi.ca requires a liberal Creative Commons Attribution license applied to all content).

Prodromou anticipates the paid service attracting customers from blogging, media, and corporate circles who want to make use of microblogging but are not interested in the overhead required to run an internal OMB server. He said about 20 customers are already up and running in the private beta, with another 30 on track before the public launch at the end of the summer. Although he could not disclose any names, he described them as "marquee clients" that will help show off the platform.

Status.net will have tiered pricing based on the type of account, and customers' subdomains will be able to be mapped to external domains to better integrate with existing web sites. Prodromou said the service will cater to three distinct classes of client: Enterprise, Publisher, and Community. Enterprise customers will get a private in-house microblogging environment similar to offerings from yammer.com, paying by-the-user. Publisher clients are more interested in the broadcast model, sending out status messages linked back to their own site's material, and delivered to multiple channels including Twitter, the Web, and Facebook. Community service is intended to serve groups and organizations who want to create a focused microblogging community around a specific topic or theme; Prodromou described this as similar to what is offered by ning.com.

He added that Status.net will offer pricing competitive with other players in the microblogging market, but that the new service will beat them "hands down" on features, functionality, and client support. "We also think the flexibility of being able to easily move off our platform makes us a great choice."

Openness changing the landscape

That last sentiment is where open source software breaks from traditional businesses' conventional wisdom. Vendor lock-in is a tried and proven strategy; open source has used freeing customers from it as a selling point in the desktop and server market for years. Prodromou does not see any difference in the network service market. "One of the nice things about Open Source in the cloud is that it gives you a lot of choice," he said — including the ability to change directions if your first vendor fails or changes the terms. "People have Web site fatigue — they're tired of investing time, energy, and social capital into new sites where they're not sure what the endgame of the company is."

Clients can easily migrate from a hosted Laconica service to a rival, or to running their own instance. Individual users and entire sites can export the accumulated "friend" and "follower" relationships between accounts in the public Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) format. Laconica was initially the only implementation of the OMB protocol, but others (such as Google's Apache-licensed JaikuEngine) now support it as well. Prodromou is pleased that other service providers are involved. "I don't think a single-implementation protocol can be robust enough. You need to have lots of implementers stretching the boundaries."

Microblogging is the latest communication tool, but the community can learn from the past. "We haven't had an important communications medium on the Internet succeed without a leading Open Source implementation," he noted, citing SMTP and HTTP as examples. The prime counter-example is instant messaging, which was long dominated by AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), and remains a fractured field to this day. "We have two good, competing protocols (SIMPLE and Jabber) and one good Open Source implementation on the server side. The main IM vendors never got synched on the protocol, and what resulted was a solution based on multi-protocol clients. I think that's been a downside of IM."

Consequently, he is amused by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey's dismissal of Identi.ca as one of "a lot of Twitter clones." Laconica and OMB are considerably more feature-rich that Twitter, he observed, and although the Identi.ca web site preserves the minimalist outlook of Twitter's site, "I don't think we're a copy, though; more of a next iteration on the concept." When he heard Dorsey's remark, "All I could think was, 'You're gonna see a lot more, if we get our way!'"

How now, network service

OMB undoubtedly offers users more than Twitter does; Twitter has even removed popular features like tracking. Prodromou is breaking relatively new ground by trying to support Laconica development with the commercial Status.net service, though.

Control Yourself has been privately funded, underwriting the development time and bandwidth costs of Identi.ca's 70,000 user accounts, but that cannot continue indefinitely. Open source desktop and server software companies have faced the same question for years, and several business models have proven themselves popular and sustainable: consulting on private installations, selling proprietary add-ons, and enterprise support contracts, for example.

The Status.net service is a mix of the private consultation and enterprise support models. Prodromou sees it as similar to the approach taken by SugarCRM and Wordpress, both of which offer their core software as open source, but sustain development with commercial services based on the same code base. "Clearly the choice that they offer users makes people comfortable with putting their time and energy into those platforms. Comparing Sugar to SalesForce.com, or WordPress to Blogger, you can see that open source is their secret weapon — what differentiates them from the market leader."

Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Law Center said that he thinks network services like microblogging are a natural fit for the enterprise support free software business model:

In my view, Twitter and Facebook are designed around the (incorrect) startup model of the late 1990s: find technology that looks cool, dump tons of money in it and assume a business model will magically emerge once everyone has heard of you.

This isn't the way real FLOSS business has ever worked. We're people that build brands around individuals and small groups of talented people. Even Red Hat started this way. And, this network service thing is ripe for that sort of model. A big tech company isn't going to want their employees dumping corporate-private information on Twitter, but they are eventually going to want the network effect of social networking and group collaboration software. An AGPLv3'd business model works perfectly in this space, just as the GPL'd model worked so well in the computing industry of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

A more direct comparison than SugarCRM or Wordpress might be to Jabber, original creator of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) protocol and its first server. Jabber also ran a free public service at jabber.org and sold enterprise consulting services to support the software and protocol development. By all accounts, the business was successful; Cisco acquired Jabber in September of 2008 for an undisclosed amount. XMPP has gone on to become an IETF standard under the guidance of the XMPP Standards Foundation.

On the other hand, an excellent, open technical standard is no guarantee of success — one needs only to look at the voice over IP (VoIP) marketplace for that. The closed, proprietary, and non-interoperable Skype still dominates the consumer VoIP market, in spite of Session Initiation Protocol's (SIP) technical superiority and IETF endorsement. In 2004, French telecom provider Wengo attempted to compete head-to-head against Skype with a SIP-based, cross-platform VoIP application called WengoPhone, but by 2007 it abandoned the project and left the VoIP business.

There are certainly successful commercial companies in the Internet telephony business, most notably Digium, the sponsor of telephony server Asterisk. Prodromou is not oblivious to the challenges of commercial competition; he co-founded Wikitravel, which competes successfully against much larger and industry-backed travel and tourism web sites. For microblogging, he thinks that Status.net offers customers not merely a private status update system, but a method to build focused communities — a service not possible on the broad social networking sites. "We've heard a lot of people talking about building communities on Twitter or Facebook, and how inter-community communication gets lost in the noise of those general purpose sites." Status.net will allow the world to see what that looks like, and hopefully push microblogging in new directions at the same time.

[ Editors Note: You can follow LWN on Identi.ca as lwnnet, as well as on Twitter as—you guessed it—lwnnet. ]

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