One Year of Identi.ca

It's been one year since the public launch of identi.ca on July 2, 2008.

At the time, I'd been working on the software for a few months, and after some friendly beta testing by Montreal tech folks, longtime Free-Software-loving friends, and autonomo.us members, I felt that it was time to Release Early, Release Often. So on vacation in Lake Tahoe, I sent out an announcement email to beta users at 5:30AM PDT. You can see my status update on the subject, which in turn links to our press release and my personal blog post at the time.

In the intervening year, we've been the subject of hundreds of blog posts and press mentions, received funding from Montreal Start Up, done 4 major point releases of the software (from last year's 0.4.x to this week's 0.8.x), and become the indisputably most important Open Source microblogging platform on the planet. Most of the goals I'd set at launch time were blown away by the end of the first month; others are still pending.

I'd like to personally thank Identi.ca's thousands of users for keeping the site lively and relevant; the Laconica developers team for putting so much effort into making the software useful and reliable. The Control Yourself team of @zach, @millette, @csarven, @foucault, @nate and @cvollick have been just excellent. Everyone who has installed the software and made a public site on the OpenMicroBlogging network (like the Twit Army) get appreciation and support.

With our private beta of the status.net platform and the release of version 0.8.0 of Laconica this week, I think that the coming year will be even more exciting. We've got a great piece of software for users to communicate with and for developers to build on; we want to make it easier for admins to install, monitor, upgrade and configure. Among other things, we plan release version 1.0 in the fall of 2009, and get into major Linux distributions and onto one-click install programs for major Web hosting companies.

P.S. Want to congratulate us? Login or register on identi.ca and post a notice with hash tag #identica1. If you haven't lately, invite a friend or two to join, and let them know.