Microblogging Revisited
I’ve already posted a bit on this matter, but web2.0 isn’t static and things evolve. Here’s how I see the scene now:
- Twitter: THE microblogging
- Jaiku: personal aggregator
- Pownce: twitter with steroids
- Tumblr: miniblogging
But things are changing! Starting by Twitter, it has stalled in my opinion, in their basic concept: only microblogging. When all other services are getting into images, videos, links, musics, quotes, you name it, Twitter spend their efforts in stabling their service (and at TwitterNotes we still get a lot of errors from Twitter!).
Jaiku has recently been acquired by Google and I guess it will have to do with the rumored gPhone! If so, Jaiku’s success will be proportional to gPhone’s.
Pownce hasn’t released the API yet, but they’re still working on new features. I guess if they had better applications (I don’t use the AIR one because it doesn’t minimize to tray!) it would be a nice service to use within small teams.
Tumblr seems to be reaching version 2.0. More features AND dead-simple go pretty good together.
A few days ago, Tiago introduced me Soup.io, another microblogging service that joins all of the others together. It seemed to me that it doesn’t bring anything new, but looked nice and it’s a nice way of having everything together. A Scrapbook as they say.
Moments ago, I was discussing with Armando about what platform would be “the chosen one” or at least how would this ones evolve. He believes that Tumblr will be the more used within sometime, but I have my doubts. Everyone (Ok, geeks and web2.0 people) is already using Twitter, have their profiles and network there. It will be hard to change everyone to a new service if the difference is not notorious, and at this is moment I don’t believe it is.
We also discussed whether it would be nice for Twitter to do trackbacks to blog posts since nowadays more and more people are using twitter to comment blogs. I usually only link it, I comment there is it is small or if I can make a nice big post out of that, I’d blog about it. But what about miniblogging (as I call tumblr and soup.io), they might deserve a trackback… What do you think?
Armando Alves
About the other platforms, perhaps the best way to go is to open the (now trendy) social graph, or instead use a service like HelloTxt to broadcast to them all.
I'm also quite interested to see what happens to Jaiku and see if Google manages to push their marketing into a Twitter killer and bind a myriad of technologies into one service (Gtalk + Notes + Bookmarks + Docs + gPhone + Jaiku).
On the trackback issue, i find it useful since we are creating a communication silo by broadcasting only within the social network.
The ability to trackback would function as a way to broaden the audience besides these closed applications.