Have you heard of Identica? Strangely enough, I found out about this Canadian micro-blogging service less than a year ago while listening to one of my European podcasts.

Identi.ca is operated and powered by StatusNet, a Montreal based company. The StatusNet platform is offered as free and open source, distributed under the GNU Affero General Public License. StatusNet seems to be monetized by offering premium services to corporate customers, which include Creative Commons, Motorola, Mozilla and Canonical. These companies use micro-blogging services internally as a communications network for employees.

So why the strong European following? Identica has a strong usership world-wide, and is especially strong in European and South Asian countries. I suspect that this was initially fueled by Identi.ca’s popularity within the open-source community, which is particularly strong in those regions of the world. The platform will continue to grow, however, fueled by the convenience of its feature-rich service and strong dedication to web-based standards.

Already, we are beginning to see the formation of data-silos within the micro-blogging community. For example, if I use Twitter and you use… anything else, then we simply can’t be friends and communicate with eachother. Evan Prodromou, CEO of StatusNet seeks a remedy to this situation, as he said in a recent interview for Cnet:

I want one microblogging place, where if I’m on one and you’re on another, we can still communicate and still be friends. That’s the long-term solution to the problem. It should be up to the services to talk to each other. That’s really the difference with Identica. I made the software open source, so you can take the software that runs Identica and install it on your own server.

With Identica, there is no compromise. It simply has more features than Twitter and a public stream. With Twitter, if you have no followers, no one can hear you scream. With Identica, there are thousands of people watching the public stream, so if you say enough interesting things, someone will start following you.

Recently, StatusNet released version 1.0 of the StatusNet Desktop software. StatusNet Desktop is a cross platform client for connecting to StatusNet clients (including Identica) and managing your content from the desktop. Interested readers should also check out Pino and Gwibber.

If you want to find me on Identica, I’m @timtro. On Twitter, I’m @timtro as well, but I do tend to use Identica more.

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