Montreal-based StatusNet, the company behind the open-source microblogging service identi.ca, is closing an $875,000 seed round today. Investors include Montreal Startup, iNovia Capital, Fotolia co-founder Oleg Tscheltzoff, and Xavier Niel. The startup, which changed its name a few weeks ago from Control Yourself, raised a previous seed round of $150,000 from Montreal Startup in January, 2009.
StatusNet wants to become the WordPress of microblogging. It created an open-source microblogging software platform (formerly called laconi.ca, now called status.net) which anyone can download and run on their own servers. Now, it is working on a hosted version of Status.net, currently in private beta. (We have 50 invites for anyone who includes the invitation code “TC09″ on the signup page).
The company recently hired Brion Vibber, the former CTO of Wikipedia, as its senior software architect. It also hired the former community manager from Creative Commons, Jon Phillips.
The bet here is that just as millions of people run their own blogs, millions of people and companies will want to run their own microblogs as well. Offering a microblogging platform as a hosted service will allow StatusNet to pursue a strategy similar to WordPress.com. It will offer the basic service for free, and then charge power-users for extras. Note that Wordpress is itself pursuing this strategy with P2 (which used to be called Prologue), as are other startups such as Shout’em.
The real market, however, is likely to be with businesses that want to run their own private Yammer-like micro-messaging service. The fact that the software is open-source is appealing to many CTOs. Already Motorola, SAP, and Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) are testing out the private beta. StatusNet plans to charge corporations about $1 per user for basic service, just like Yammer.
Currently, Status.net is only available as a download (which can be run behind a firewall). There are about 2,000 public microblogging sites in total running on status.net right now, with somewhere between 200,000 to 300,000 active users. The biggest site running on status.net is the Twitter clone identi.ca, which the StatusNet itself runs as a way to demonstrate its technology. It has only about 80,000 active users.
As I pointed out more than a year ago, identi.ca is never going to rival Twitter. But StatusNet is not trying to do that. Any StatusNet microblogging service can act as a Twitter client and send out messages to Twitter as well.
The idea of a federated, open-source microblogging platform is powerful because of its distributed nature. In fact, Twitter might want to think about doing something similar, and sell Twitter server software to corporations.
It will be interesting to see where they go in the next few months. Congrats to @evanpro. It’s always nice to see another great startup from Montreal in here!
Good Luck to the team. We’ll be following you closely!
It can easily rival Twitter with a trivial change: cut-paste your client’s API code, change URL from Twitter to Identi.ca
WordPress has a cool theme named P2 that can turn a WordPress blog into a hosted Twitter like network!
http://wordpres...xtend/themes/p2
Thank you for the theme link much apreciated!
By the way its nice to see open source projects going ahead it to the game!
Does P2 allow
1. Anyone to signup?
2. Anyone to follow anyone and their status updates?
This is great news for the open source community around microblogging. Congratulations to @evan (on idetni.ca) for the great work.
We run bleeper.de ( http://bleeper.de ) on StatusNet since about a year already (accompanying the development process from the early days on) and made it to the largest German speaking microblogging service.
Long live the Open Microblogging Protocol (OMB) and tear down the walled gardens !!
it is interesting …………
So, we might see some twitter competition as many people may start their own micro-blogging sites!
Some smart guy may come out with some killer feature which will take away many users from Twitter!
We can’t wait for that so we can use it at
http://www.maxo...ineservices.com
http://www.smartbizzz.com
$875K is a lot for a microblog system. Its domain name is nice, I’m wondering how will they implement their new features….
Congratulations Evan!
Federation and open systems are good things.
bob wyman
I would imagine microblogging would be a really great industry for basically any niche. As the webmaster of course. There are a lot of possibilities involved in this. And yes I would agree that the Twitter geeks who develop all of the coolest apps geared toward Twitter would be churning out some really good stuff.
Congrats and bravo to the Status.net team on this great news !
Things are definitely happening in Montreal….
Cool name.
Bob, thanks a lot! I’m pretty psyched by the opportunity to push adoption of our platform. We’ll be building up the sales and support force necessary for serious traction.
Congratulations to Evan P.
Congrats to the Status.net crew, this is a great example of the steady energy level increase around startups in Montreal and one of the strong projects we have seen emerging this year.
It’s not a coincidence that Status.net was born out of the BarCamps and open source culture we have around here (Evan is one of the early organizers and supporter of these events). It’s the perfect petri dish for incubating ideas and businesses…
Congrats @evanpro and StatusNet!
I’m looking forward to see where this investment will lead StatusNet.
Nice and congrats.. we’ll roll ours shortly, for yet another wordpress of microblogging, via yet another code base of our own that’s being built, also to be available open source.
Congrats to all those that have worked to get status.net to this stage. This new spin on things is definitely interesting.
This is fantastic news. Congratulations to Evan and the StatusNet staff.
It appears that my decision to roll out full and comprehensive support for StatusNet sites in SocialOomph.com was a well-timed decision.
Congrats to the Status.net team. All the best to you.
Well done guys.
Congrats to the team! BTW, 900k of funding in Montreal will get you as far as 3-4 millions in Silicon Valley.
l’ll check this out.. my existing http://www.ifans.net is on wordpress p2 theme but it’s not as features rich a la twitter
nice to see Montreal is on the map. Good luck to you guys!!
Congratulations to Evan and the team at Status.net.
Disclosure: I’m a venture partner at both Montreal Startup & iNovia Capital the investors in Status.net
Evan, great job getting visibility and launching status.net. … The “wordpress of microblogging”.. I like the focus!
Have you guys tried our open source micro-blogging platform Blurt.it yet? (http://www.blurt.it) It supports multimedia, profiles and more. Come on, we are about to launch a brand new enterprise version of Blurt.it, that is for ISP, SaaS, and resellers who want to run a white label sites for niche markets. It will include a real-time dashboard, multimedia support, group creation, RSS aggregation, security and a lot more. And this is only our micro-blogging, wait to see what our Ent 2.0 can do
Identi.ca is already ahead of Twitter in several areas such as enabling attachments, Jabber-integration, enhanced search-engine indexing and customer support. Oh, and the Status.net code is downloadable FOSS.
As a fast-moving startup, Status.net is in a good position to take the lead in enabling federation between micro-blogging platforms, imitating email’s breakout from walled gardens in the early 1990s. Before email federation, many platforms only allowed emailing to recipients within the same garden (AOL, CompuServe, etc.).
I’m hoping that federation can occur with the help of third-level non-display domains such as .tel because of the tiered privacy protections, FOSS orientation and free third-level domain allocations available.
I’m also hoping that Status.net can close the last major feature gap with Twitter in enabling Status/Identi.ca users to NOT see @ replies sent by people they are following to those whom they are NOT following. Otherwise, Identi.ca is totally the best place to start and finish one’s microblogging experience. Très leet.
Congrats Evan! and congrats on the KK team; OB, RS and the team for their 2nd deal! Moneytization strategies, go to market and invoice trigering will be interesting to see
Tumblr is the one I think of first for microblogging. I don’t know if anything can beat that. Even Twitter, though huge in volume, does not have all the features. Tumbr also has a community/ social network.
Congrats to the Status.net