innonate

Since late last week, there’s been an echo-chamber, mini-buzz around a new “micro-blogging” service called Identica.

Usually, I’m quite weary of such buzz. For instance, you won’t see me write about a service that starts with the letter “P” and ends with “urk” because there’s no “there there.” Even though I used BrightKite for a few weeks, I never wrote about it for the same reason. Cool, but not cool enough.

And, quite frankly, I’m not writing about Identica as a “Twitter killer” because I don’t think the “there” is with Identica itself.

Instead, I believe the “there” with Identica is the open source platform Identica runs on, called Laconica.

Laconica is, on the surface, “Twitter in a box” software. With the exception of SMS integration (coming soon), it has all the same bells and whistles, and was (supposedly) built with many of the lessons learned from Twitter’s well documented problems, which is why folks are hoping it can be a bit more stable.

The real significance of Laconica, though, is its interoperability other installations of itself. Since it’s an open source platform, this allows people to now create a federated network of “micro-blogging” services.

Return of the BBS

If you’re my age or older, you remember the BBS‘.

The point about BBS’ I want to make is that while they came in all shapes and sizes, and while a few were very general, most were very niche; and in their niche, they were also very often very locally-oriented (kids: there used to be something called “long distance” phone calls!).

Nonetheless, and no matter how niche, FidoNET (first software and then a protocol) came along and allowed individual BBS’ to connect with one another, effectively federating themselves.

So, what does this have to do with Laconica?

If you think Twitter-style communication is a new form of communication (I do); and if you think that it’s a form of communication which will stick around for a while (I do); and you think distributed, open systems are generally more durable than even the most API friendly centralized services (I do); then, your mind can quickly become attracted to the implications of a platform like Laconica.

Implications

If Identica continues to attract people to its service and developers (also people ;) to Laconica, I imagine a world where we go back to a federated system of services, all offering Twitter-style messaging.

Also, I imagine these federated communities to have niche and especially locally-flavored tints. Last week, for instance, I bought the domain “yorking.net,” imagining a New York-oriented micro-blogging service. With a service like “Yorking,” a micro-blogging outfit could automatically tie-in niche local services, information, partnerships with other content providers, etc — a lot of stuff Twitter itself can’t really do from a global, centralized position.

Now, before I continue, you’re probably wondering what kind of stuff you could do with a federated micro-blogging service vs building on top of Twitter (who gets major points for great APIs). Even putting aside reliability and control issues (as big as they are), think about the freedom to integrate core services people have. Heck, they could rearchitect the entire stack, as long as they abided by the same protocols as the other Laconica providers.

There are also business model implications. Last week, I wrote that Twitter’s best business model would be implementing a mobile P2P payments system. However, with a distributed system, there’s no long a “single best” model, and instead there’s room for business model diversity. Like with BBS’, many Laconica providers would remain free; however, some would have subscription fees, some would be ad supported, some would be private, etc, etc.

Who’s going to be the WELL of micro-blogging communities?

Who’s Poised to Win

Gawker, Gothamist, ApartmentTherapy, Going.com, Thrillist and — more than anyone else — Twitter.

There are two type of organizations poised to win in a distributed micro-blogging world: folks with an existing niche membership/audience who would derive use from the new form of communication; and, folks with who already have people using the new form of communication, like Jaiku, Dodgeball, BrightKite, and — most especially — Twitter.

Conclusion

Who knows whether Identica or Laconica will be around a year from now? One thing I do know is that the discussion surrounding a “distributed Twitter” isn’t going anywhere. If Laconica fails, something else will pop up with more or less the same compelling story. I guess the final question is, as with every eminent movement, when will enough people actually get on board to make something have legs?

UPDATE 1: Please also read my friend Eran Hammer-Lahav’s excellent 3-part series of posts called Scaling a Microblogging Service. He not only explains Twitter’s scaling problems well, he also tries to debunk (from an engineering perspective, rather than my “web trend” perspective) how beneficial a federated system would be.

Twitter’s not going to make their money with advertising. So how can they be a Billion Dollar Company in a year? By listening to me.

Twitter should take full advantage of their messaging platform, user base and user disposition to lead in the P2P mobile payments space. They can become the next PayPal, and are more poised to become that than PayPal itself.

Let’s rewind for a second. Last year, I wrote an in depth analysis about mobile payments and concluded that, in order to move forward:

The best option is probably not doing a stand alone payment system. What I mean by that is that mobile payments need to be integrated into a larger online presence, especially if you have a site which is membership based.

…

With WAP and SMS having low penetration (again, sub-50%!), it will be the responsibility of those with an online presence already to move folks onto mobile platforms and mobile payment systems, as carriers and PayPal (VeriSign and Visa Mobile as well) can only do so much.

That was then. Now, Twitter has the growing social network, noteworthy penetration, and is building the core infrastructure to make this happen. Here’s how:

Ubiquity & Penetration

Forget infrastructure, forget great partnerships: the most important place a mobile payments system can start with is ubiquity.

Twitter is far from being a ubiquitous mobile platform, but they have more penetration and usage than any other mobile service and their current user base is the same important group of technology early adopters that PayPal enjoyed when it convinced the world that you could send money to an email address.

Twitterers Know/Learn Machine Language

One of the most missed facts in the mobile payments space is that users of a system have to be comfortable communicating using machine language. This is to say, one must remember and follow certain semantics so the system knows how much you’re paying and to whom.

Twitter users are already trained in this important action. Every time a Twitterer uses the “@,” “d” or even “#” to direct Twitter or annotate the messages it sends through the system, people are using the exact sort of machine language they’d need to use for mobile payments to work.

Having users already comfortable speaking in machine lanaguage is already a huge plus for Twitter. I already “d” you a direct message. Now I’d like to “p” you $5.

Carrier Independent Messaging Infrastructure

Forget, for a moment, that Twitter has had serious scaling problems and buy into, for a moment, to the fact that Twitter is currently rebuilding their entire infrastructure to function like a messaging system.

The significance of this is how Twitter will continue to wrap itself around (not to) the mobile carriers and further integrate with our mobile devices.

When the rearchitecting is all said and done, Twitter will be a carrier independent social messaging platform — one that can harness both the power of the social web AND mobile messaging infrastructure, which will be a powerful one-two punch in the mobile P2P payment space.

Conclusion

If Twitter had a P2P payments system in place today, it would become the most used mobile payments system overnight. Having the ability to send a message like “p innonate $5″ for that beer I just bought you would integrate seamlessly with the way Twitter’s users already interact with their system.

Layering on a payments system would not only make the feature instantly used, it would position Twitter to revolutionize how money is collected and exchanged on the Internet (think of what Twitter’s done for flashmobs and how it could effect fundraising).

Twitter, I hope you’re listening.

Chris Messina is one of the smarter, forward-thinking guys I know. Here’s a great little presentation to flip through and imagine that you were in Copenhagen with him:

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Talk about ideas which came too early and WebTV (now MSN) might be the textbook example.

Maybe one day we’ll say BricaBox was that too ;-P

Anyway, I’ve written a lot about the AppleTV, and pointed out how I see it as something of The Future in media, advertising and entertainment.

Well, today, more evidence of this inevitability comes to us via The Google: they announced the Google Media Server.

Next to Apple, perhaps no one is more poised to bring web content into the living room in the uber-important lean-back setting than Google: they have the content, they understand the “discovery” aspects of thing pretty well (vast understatement) and, well, they’re damn good at most things they try to do.

Look for the Media Server to be a force.

Lastly, I’ll point you to this great post from Brian Litvack: The Interent Will Be Televised. Brian’s experience and insight in spot on in terms of how folks are discovering that the mix between the web and the livingroom has finally found its time.

Steve Perlman, now we can say you were right all along.

If you have a jailbroken iPhone, go download the Instinctiv app today (found in the Multimedia folder of Installer.app).

Instinctiv is an “instinctive shuffle” application, which changes forever the way you look at the shuffle button on your iPhone or iPod touch.

Before, you’d press shuffle and spend more time skipping through songs you don’t want to hear than listening to ones you actually are in the mood for.

Instinctiv, however, uses its powerful recommendation algorithms and some behavior technology to play exactly what you’re in the mood for. If it guesses incorrectly, only a skip or two will get in on the right track.

I’ve been using Instinctiv for the past day and it’s worked startling well for me. At my desk yesterday, I found myself go for over an hour listening to music on shuffle without pressing “next” even a single time. That sold me.

Anyway, here’s a cute video the team put together to show *why* shuffle without Instinctiv technology can be a disaster. This has happened to all of us, right?

Also as part of the product announcement, Instinctiv announced that it had raised $750,000 from angel investors, Cayuga Venture Fund, and Rose Tech Ventures.

Full disclosure: Rose Tech Ventures is where I serve as Entrepreneur in Residence and Instinctiv CEO Justin Smithline is one of my good friends.

Today, FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein — along with a dozen other industry leaders, like Vint Cerf, Larry Lessig, and NYC’s Brad Burnham — announced the launch of InternetforEveryone.org, a call for universal access to high speed, broadband Internet for the US.

The announcement, made at the Personal Democracy Forum, provided four principals for their cause: access, choice, openness, and innovation. The idea: in 2008 Broadband Internet can no longer be a luxury; and, like other public utilities, social and economic equality and advancement rests on flattening access to this technology.

Indeed, American innovation is at the heart of this argument and the group provided data to support their claims.

Since 2001, the United State’s worldwide rank in broadband penetration has declined from 4th to 15th, behind Germany and France.

Broadband is also more expensive in the US, though relatively slower than many other countries.

When pressed on the group wasn’t presenting an actual plan to fix these issues (just a leadership committee) Commissioner Adelstein replied that there was no lack of plans in front of the FCC, rather just a lack of leadership to push through the right plan.

Right as that answer may be (the upcoming changes within the executive branch were also cited), a real plan is needed for the general public to get behind. The leadership committee is a great start — and they certainly stacked it with smart people from the right and from the left — but I imagine most will await the plan before we can rally to what seems like a great cause.

Today, I am very pleased to announce my new position as Entrepreneur in Residence at Rose Tech Ventures.

Loyal readers of my blog (RSS link here) will know this news only a few days old. Last week, after sadly announcing the close of BricaBox, lead of Rose Tech Ventures and Chair of the New York Angels David S. Rose (who has been an informal adviser over the last several months, and to who I had informed the week prior about my plans), called me up to his office and offered me this exciting opportunity. I accepted immediately and started yesterday.

So, what does this new position hold for me?

Well, only time will tell where my day-to-day focus will exactly be, but fundamentally it means I get to collaborate more with you, my fellow entrepreneurs.

Rose Tech Ventures is and has been up to loads of exciting things in New York. With my new position, I’ll be active in nearly ever aspect of the early stage investing game: sourcing, evaluation, tending to portfolio companies, etc.

Most exciting for me is the new “startup coworking” space, launching soon at Rose Tech Ventures (photo of my desk above). If you’re a startup with between 1 and 5 people and would like to work among other exciting startups in the epicenter of Silicon Alley, please contact me and I can send you more information as it becomes available (also, we’ll be hosting some informational events in the space coming soon).

Whatever I’m doing, I know I’m bound to learn a ton — just like I learned a ton from BricaBox. David is an excellent teacher and the rest of his team are top notch people. Also, he sees just about every deal that passes through this town, and getting a front row seat to this will undoubted make me smarter and wiser as I choose what my next entrepreneurial adventure holds for me.

Again, thanks for the good wishes you sent me last week. I’m very excited for what’s to come and look forward to updating this space even more often with this entrepreneur’s (now in residence) ideas, insight, and questions.

PS: Here’s a fun photo I took on Monday — my first day as an EIR — with Jason Calacanis. The reason I took the picture is that I first heard about the concept of an EIR when Jason took the same position at Sequoia Capital prior to founding Mahalo. “What a dream job,” I thought. Well, I’m no Calacanis (I’m me, as my mother would say), but he was also a NYC tech guy and I hope I can also create a great company when I’m through serving as EIR.

I’m at the Personal Democracy Forum today, live Twittering it for Silicon Alley Insider (seriously — I have a press badge).

PDF is by far one of my favorite conferences of the year.

First of all, it mixes my two biggest passions: politics and technology. Secondly, it’s just so high level. Looking around me, there are people who are genuinely interested and interesting. For example, Craig Newmark, of Craigslist, is sitting next to me and totally engaged in the talk.

I guess you could call it the DAVOS of tech. And that’s where I’ll be for the next few days.

The outpouring of good wishes has been incredible today.

After such a crappy thing to announce, I’m excited to say I have a positive announcement to make on Monday.

Thanks everyone. This community has been truly the best to work with!

“Was she being supremely Machiavellian? Or had she simply lost her mind?”
– John Hielemann, on Hillary Clinton’s final weeks campaigning

Today, I’m announcing my plans to close BricaBox, LLC.

This decision, which has taken place over the last few weeks, was as complicated as are my feelings about it. Nonetheless, I can tell you most of this decision revolved around issues of money, traction, team, and vision: the four essentials of a successful startup.

I think it’s fair to say that a startup deserves to live if it has good quantities of at least three of those four things, and BricaBox is now out of all but one of them.

Perhaps, even, it was out of them sometime ago — this is where that quote about Hillary Clinton comes in — and we’ve just been in denial.

Whatever it is, I’m going to take a tremendous amount of experience, lessons, wisdom, etc with me. And, over the next few weeks, I intend on blogging diligently about every aspect of this failure. I’ve taken extensive mental notes on these lessons, and I look forward to sharing them with you. I think this process will help me institutionalize these lessons for myself, and of course I hope you can learn something from them as well.

For now, I’ll give you a table of contents for what’s to come. Subscribe to my RSS feed to be alerted to when I post and see below for some teasers.

As for what I intend on doing next, you can be sure that it will be something entrepreneurial. A few weeks ago, I spoke to a few of the companies I admire most in New York (about joining their ranks), but realized quickly that I was not ready to take my hand off the entrepreneur’s tiller.

So, I plan on doing a mix of things: consulting for media and technology companies, launching some exciting small projects with my friends (soon to be announced), and exploring new startup opportunities.

Of course, with all these things, I now have the perspective of building and launching BricaBox — and I’m excited to put those lessons to work. Also, I bring with me my entire life experience, dating back to my first company (Westheimer Family Plants and Produce), building and running Brandeis Television, directing new media operations at National Public Media, and working with political organizations like David Pepper’s campaign for Mayor and now TruthThroughAction.org’s project.

I’ve realized that I’m a “new media mechanic” — one part technical, one part zen — so, if I can help you tune-up your online media operations, please let me know.

As for what I intend on doing with BricaBox itself, time will also tell. We’ll keep the site live for now. However, if there’s a media company in need of a proprietary platform to scale thousands of user-generated content websites, I think BricaBox could be of great use for them. Of course Open Sourcing is another option, though that would also require a certain level of interest from the community.

Last of all, I want to thank several people who made the experience with BricaBox wonderful (though there were countless who had a great effect on the experience): Thanks to the nextNY community for free business school and for the friendships; thanks to Evan Bartlett, Michael Galpert, Charlie O’Donnell (my biggest — always constructive — critic), Alex Lines, and to David S. Rose, for his mentorship. A big thanks goes to my dad for his watchful eye. Many thanks go to Gary Vaynerchuk for his commitment to my success. To Allen Stern of CenterNetworks, the great guys at Silicon Alley Insider and Caroline McCarthy of CNET, thanks for promoting New York Tech companies!

Thanks to Mike Hostetler for stepping into the technical lead when we were most in need.

And lastly, thanks to everyone who loved BricaBox like I did. We had some awesome users and fans, like Nichelle Stephens, Andrew Watson, Ari Greenberg, and more. Asking them to say goodbye to BricaBox hurts the most!

As I write the final words of this post, my mind is still coming up with reasons and ways not to do this; alas, it must be done — it is that time. Now, I get to look onwards and upwards. As I look at the table of contents (below) to my startup’s postmortem, I get excited about working on what’s next. The opportunities I have coming are incredibly exciting, and applying all that I’ve learned to the next Big Thing will make it all worth it. That’s for sure.

Postmortem Table of Contents (complete posts to come)

Companies should tackle Market Problems, not Technical Problems.
BricaBox was a solution to a technical problem I had. While it’s good to scratch itches, it’s best to scratch those you share with the greater market. If you want to solve a technical problem, get a group together and do it as open source.

Start with a real team.
There are a million things a startup needs to do and a dozen skill sets. If you get more people involved from the get-go, you can better distribute responsibility, and grow on the cheap.

Lightweight or heavyweight? Choose one. It matters how you spend.
Does your startup have a burn-rate? If it’s above $0, think about concentrating it and speeding up development. BricaBox was fed-but-anemic and and slowly roasting its cash. Do it again and I’ll concentrate those costs at the beginning. We would have had twice the product in 2/3 of the time.

When in doubt, build off Open Source.
One of the first questions I had to deal with, while building BricaBox, was why we weren’t modifying an existing Open Source solution, like Wordpress MU. We were a CMS at heart, after all. Next time, I’ll give more consideration to building off and participating in existing Open Source project.

Go vest yourself.
When a co-founder walks out of a company — as was the case for me — you’ve already been dealt a heavy blow. Don’t exacerbate the issue by needing to figure out how to deal with a large equity deadweight on your hands (investors won’t like that the #2 stakeholder is absent, even estranged, from your company). So, the best way of dealing with this issue is to take a long, long vesting period for all major sweat equity founders.

More to come…