This week, Google announced they were stopping development on Jaiku and releasing it as an open source project maintained by volunteers. This follows just a month after Pownce was bought by Six Apart and shut down. With the economy the way it is, it’s not surprising to see some of these services close, but it has started me thinking about what this means for the overall microblogging market.
Twitter is currently the leader in this market and, despite no announced revenue streams yet, shows no signs of collapse. The reliability problems of a few months ago — which is when some of these other services launched, hoping to pull users away — have largely been solved. More importantly, Twitter has reached critical mass. It has enough users that when someone wants to start microblogging they go to Twitter because everyone is there.
The rest of the microblogging sites, while not shutting down, have not shown signs of gaining ground, either. Plurk continues to plug along with no news, good or bad, coming from them lately. Identi.ca, which is based on an open source, distributed microblogging project, is in active development, but I don’t see a lot of people joining the OpenMicroBlogging standard.
So does that mean Twitter is the only game in town? Not necessarily. Twitter is growing and will likely remain the top microblogging network for the foreseeable future, but there’s always room for someone new to come in and innovate. We will likely see more niche microblogging sites — Yammer, for example — emerge and find an audience.
Looking at the field of microblogging sites, I now have a new appreciation for services like Ping.fm that update several sites simultaneously. If you’re serious about microblogging, it makes sense to maintain your presence on more than one so that you’re not left in the lurch when someplace closes. Also, if it’s important to you not to lose that content, be sure to find out if your favorite site has an export feature and use it regularly.
What microblogging services do you think will succeed? And which ones do you think will fail? Let me know in the comments.
I think critical mass is more important than innovation at moment. Especially when some services thinks that lifestreaming is somehow next big thing and feeding everything possible and music tracks on top makes microblogging experience better.
Unless something that is actually innovating shows up – Twitter is biggest fish in pond for a long time.
I like my momentary microblogging workflow which is pretty easy to monitor:
- Conversation on identi.ca (http://identi.ca/markusmerz/, http://identi.ca/markusmerz//all)
- Crosspost original messages (not starting with @) to Twitter (http://twitter.com/Markus_Merz)
- Collect everything on FriendFeed (http://twitter.com/Markus_Merz)
- Conversation on FriendFeed
- Crosspost some sources from FriendFeed to Twitter
I like the way identi.ca works and how Laconica is developed (see the server list).
I am pretty new on FriendFeed but this is definitely the direction to follow when thinking about lifestreaming & microblogging + threaded conversation. FriendFeed makes the most sense to me & I am already loving it.
How come nobody ever brings up Yonkly. They have the best micro-blogging service out there. Adsense revenue and my Yonkly updates go on my Twitter too.
http://www.getzooted.yonkly.com
So with Ping.fm you write what you write and it sends the same message to all services?
While I have a Twitter account, I’m still not sold on it as a longterm model. It still seems like a fad. When my time is tight its the first thing that I cut out of my schedule.
> – Collect everything on FriendFeed
Ops, http://friendfeed.com/merz1 would have been the right C&P thingy. Sorry for the confusion.
I have to agree that the growth of the OpenMicroBlogging community is not as fast as the growth of twitter, but it is the only real alternative. We should give it time and support. I strongly believe in the openness and freedom of the net. That's why we support this approach and push it in Germany with the largest laconica installation outside North America called http://bleeper.de
Come and join the crowd
I still haven’t figured out the real purpose of Twitter / microblogging. I’m not sure anyone cares about the funny things my cat did this morning…. or other such silly things I might “micro blog.”
I’d have to agree with Blog Connection – if I Twittered ( which I don’t ), I’d cut it first thing if I was crunched for time. Perhaps fortunately, I’m already super crunched, so I haven’t found the time to even work it in.
should give it time and support. I strongly believe in the openness and freedom of the net.