Even if it is open source, if your microblogging software is an enterprise collaboration tool, isn't it just a feature in ECM?
StatusNet announced today that it had secured an “A” round of funding led by FirstMark Capital. This brings the total investment in the open source microblogging company to about $2.3m. That is a decent amount of money for a Web 2.0/Social Networking company in today’s market. Congratulations to the team and a another example of open source business models finding favor in the VC world. But is StatusNet a classic case of a company built around a feature? After thinking about it a bit today, I think it is.
To be fair I was not terribly familiar with StatusNet before today. When I saw the announcement though I did a little digging (not on digg.com though, no pun intended). At first, seeing microblogging, I thought it was perhaps some sort of open source competitor to Twitter. Much the same way we are seeing open source alternatives to Facebook. I thought to myself, “good luck taking on the Twitter buzz saw.” While in fact that is partially true, that does not appear to be the focus of the StatusNet management team.
Then I dug (not dugg) a little deeper. It seems StatusNet is not really trying to take on Twitter at all. They are giving you the software or offer it as a hosted SaaS type of service which allows you to offer your own microblogging site for your own community or internal network. According to an article in TechCrunch,
Evan Prodromou, founder and CEO of StatusNet, says the company is currently building an enterprise sales and support team to further push its software into the Global 1,000 market.
Using its solutions, companies can set up new communication and collaboration systems inside corporate firewalls. StatusNet plug-ins can integrate with other enterprise applications, and gives companies a way to keep their mobile workforces connected (Motorola uses their software for “internal social communications”).
So this would seem to me that they want to make StatusNet a collaboration tool for the enterprise. Hey that is a great market. But there are also some great products in that market. Including some great open source tools that I have written about before like MindTouch.
Does the ECM space need a microblogging tool? I think it does. But having that functionality, does it belong in a stand alone product? The answer to that I am afraid is no. This sounds to me more like a feature of an ECM, rather than an ECM product.
Unfortunately, that is all too often the case. Many great ideas when they are funded turn out to be great features, but not enough to build a stand alone product around. I think this is the case with enterprise class collaboration microblogging.
To be fair, StatusNet is also the underlying platform for the Indenti.ca, the open source twitter like service. Maybe there is some business model there.
Otherwise I would expect to see microblogging features built into most ECM tools very soon. Or maybe someone just ponies up and buys StatusNet for a decent return on the 2.3m they have raised pretty quickly. I hope so for their investors sake.
