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 and autonomo.us members, I felt that it was time to Release Early, Release Often. So on vacation in Lake Tahoe with my pregnant wife and in-laws, and jetlagged and unable to sleep, 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 of Journal/14 Messidor CCXVI. We had 10K users within 30 hours; I switched hosting providers and did a new release of the software within 72. It was a busy time.
I had no idea that identi.ca and Laconica would become such an important part of my life and of the Internet landscape. In the intervening year, we've received seed 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.
I'd like to take moment to give my personal thanks to folks who've helped make this project such a success:
- My wife @majnoona and children @amitajune and @stavro who've been so patient with my work and travel schedule over the last 12 months.
- My innumerable friends and colleagues who've set up accounts on identi.ca and used them. You learn who your friends are when you start a new project like this.
- The thousands and thousands of people who've become new friends through the site. I've been awed by how many folks have caught onto the dream of Open Source, distributed microblogging and made it their own.
- The dozens of developers who've written code for Laconica, or plugins, or API clients that use the software.
- The team of developers and admins at Control Yourself: @zach, @csarven, @millette, @nate, @foucault and @cvollick. They've put in long hours and done some really impressive technical feats to keep us going in the face of growth and technology changes.
I'm looking forward to another big year.