Recommended! Click here to Run a Free Scan for PC Errors

Twitter, FriendFeed, Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk

Posted on July 16, 2008 at 5:12 am

It’s pretty safe to say 2008 will be a year we remember by 3 things; the Yahoo-Microsoft debacle, the iPhone 3G and the incessant whining about Twitter.

Twitter was never particularly stable, even in it’s infancy, but the growth to dominant micro-blogging and life-streaming platform has made instability so common a whole range of additional services sprung up to cope with it.

March and April of this year was all about how everyone was going to quit Twitter if it didn’t pick up its game and stop going down every second day. Fast forward to today, July, and it’s become fairly obvious that nothing will stop the growth of Twitter, and the only people who’ve stopped using it are those with a newer, shinier toy.

Over June Twitter first crippled itself (reducing the number of API calls from clients to 10 and hour, and even stopping @replies for some time) then slowly brought itself back up to speed (100 API calls an hour, the return of replies).

Yet, did we see Twitter suddenly lose popularity? Did people leave by the hundreds? Actually no, Twitter enjoyed some healthy growth, more growth in fact then any of its competitors and the much praised Friend-Feed.

Let’s take a quick look at some of these competitors:

Jaiku

Google Acquired Jaiku some time ago and since then has pretty much done little with the service. Pointless? No, Google managed to get a group of very talented engineers, apparently now working on more projects within Google.

Verdict: With seemingly little interest from anyone, Jaiku slowly fades away. Google concentrates on other offerings such as Lively, it’s new 3D virtual world.

Pownce

Initially got a great deal of interest during development and launch. It was Twitter, but with all the features everyone wanted so bad including file sharing, an actual business model (advertising) and stability.

The community evolved into less of a global conversation to smaller private groups. Has been struggling for traction now and desperately introducing new features to attract more users.

Verdict: Is useful for small groups and communities and for file sharing, but I doubt will ever gain the popularity to compete with Twitter.

Plurk

Plurk stood out from the start for its genuinely unique interface, sharing abilities and the threaded conversations.

After being originally described as Twitter on steroids, or a other variants, it soon became obvious that Plurk encouraged a different style of communication and a different kind of user.

‘Plurks’ where less of an announcement to the world in general, and more of the commencement of a conversation between you and other users where everyone could contribute and see what others where saying.

Verdict: After an initial buzz, Plurk has fallen off the radar slightly, however it has an active community and growth looks positive. Unique enough that it doesn’t have to ‘compete’ with Twitter.