Identi.ca Wants To Become Jabber, Inc.?

I guess the VCs at Montreal Start Up hadn’t foreseen that Google was about to make Jaiku an open source project before deciding to fund Indenti.ca to do the same thing.

In all fairness, the Identi.ca play seems more like following in the footsteps of Jabber, inc, who supported the Jabber/XMPP standard for years, playing nice with the open source weenies, but making a ruggedized, industrial grade instant messaging platform that was embraced by telephony giants and other large software vendors, like Oracle, and eventually Cisco, who purchased the company last year.

Meanwhile, Twitter has been growing really fast with an open API, open ecosystem model, and even knocking off the API won’t bring individual users into the Identi.ca fold: it would require large scale enterprise adoption. Meanwhile, that’s the shortest path to money for Twitter, so expect Ev Williams and company to make some serious moves there this year. Not to mention that the sidelining of Jaiku could spell an acquisition of Twitter by Google (see Google Shake Up: Jaiku Sidelined, Moving On Twitter?)

So this may turn out to be a difficult transition for Identi.ca.