140Char

Once upon a time, there were three prominent microblogging platforms, Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku. One became incredibly popular, one introduced a side-on view, and one was acquired and then released by the Google Fairy Godmother.

Others fell by the wayside, including Pownce, and Rejaw.

But how do they compare now, after the mainstream adoption of Twitter:

Obviously this doesn’t tell the complete story, as it tracks web visits only, but it’s safe to assume it’s proportionally correct. Twitter’s close to 25 million Unique Visitors, Plurk is holding steady between 250,000-300,000 for the past year, and Jaiku has dropped from 70,000 down to 30-40,000 for the last two months measured.

In fact, it’s not even winning the Open Source Microblogging Platform war – as Identi.ca has grown slightly while Jaiku declined.

Meanwhile, Google has listed the 46 official accounts it has on Twitter.

And in the meantime, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck, internal microblogging such as Yammer,  the blend of micro and macro blogging in Tumblr and Posterous, and video and audio blogging with the likes of 12 seconds and Audioboo. Not forgetting the lifestreaming element of the likes of Friendfeed.

And although we talk about forums, blogs and Web 2.0 social networks as if they’ve reached the endpoint of their evolution, there’s still a lot more to come from them – I’d say the social elements of the web aren’t even 15% of what they’ll become in the next 10 years.

The question is how you as a person, you as a company, or you as a developer can find clarity through it all…

(There is also the question fo what Google were thinking re: Jaiku, and how it’s managing to miss out on the rise of Open Source as much as it did on the rise of microblogging – after all, the platform itself doesn’t appear to be the cause)

All the things I haven’t managed to cram into the week:

Rania Al Abdullah, Queen of Jordan joins Twitter – and gets it:

Nice to see even royalty are getting in on microblogging.

Accessible Twitter makes the Twitter website meets accessibility requirements:

It’s easy to forget how important accessibility requirements are for so many internet users – including all of us as we age!

Interesting look at whether any of the myriad of Twitter-based enterprises can turn a profit:

It’s quite a good overview of a handful of the more promising/interesting Twitter-based attempts to make money – would be better with some added interviews/insight/figures on how the companies are actually doing – which is an area I want to explore more with 140Char.

Roadtwip:

Follow some friends (including ReadWriteWeb contributor Jolie O’Dell) as they roadtrip through 10 cities and 10 social media events..some fun inspiration to end Friday with.

The only thing that moves as fast as Twitter is the blog coverage of Twitter. So much that even a day away from blogging leads to a pile of content which, if it were in print, would be threatening to trap me in an avalanche of theories about monetisation…but on the bright side:

• A brilliant post by Rohit Bhargava included the following ‘5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance‘

5 stages of Twitter Acceptance by Rohit Bhargava

• Follower counts will go down as Twitter releases a change to remove deleted and suspended users. Just hope I’ve avoided too many suspended users considering I’d just reach 1925 followers in the charity race to 2000.
• Techcrunch has a write-up about a cool -looking service called Stattweets for sports fans to keep track of their teams. But seeing as it’s only U.S. sports teams, I’m ignoring it for the moment out of principle!
• Via Venturebeat, the news that two-month old StockTwits has closed a first round of venture funding.
• Mashable covers undeniably pretty but possibly pointless new microblogging platform Yonkly. It looks to have some nice features, but it’s running a paid model, and has the problem of trying to raise critical mass against Twitter. Noone mention Plurk…
• Speaking of Twitter, they’re hiring a product manager.
• And from one of the many places covering it, Marketing Pilgrim on the fact Twitter has joined Google Friend Connect – apparently they are also working on joining Facebook Friend Connect and Myspace’s ID solution.

And that’s before I consider the very real risk to my self-esteem of joining Twit or Fit? Or the fact I went to the very enjoyable Twinterval on Monday and didn’t grab any photos, although I did get to chat to a bunch of cool people that I knew, and some cool people that I met that evening.

It appears that the automated plugin isn’t quite working correctly, so here’s an authentically manual list:

Twittermaven: The Invisible Twitterman: Or how one man’s shameless self-promotion appears to be generating a similar response to Magpie adding adverts to tweets. “First Facebook, now Twitter. The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, has taken himself to the top of the social media networks yet again, this time beating out 99.9% of the fastest growing site’s members”

Except it turns out that actually he hasn’t.

DownloadSquad: A few days later, a better notifier: Ding, It’s Up: A new service which will let you register a site which is currently down, and then Tweet you when it’s back online.

Wikinomics: Keep your plants healthy (or alive) with Twitter’s help: The perfect way for your spouse or partner to make sure they get back from a vacation to find all their beloved greenery hasn’t withered away. For $99 , a plant can send you Tweets such as “Water me, please!”.

Logic + Emotion: Can you retweet that:

'Can you retweet that?' by David Armano at Logic + Emotion

These are my links for November 28th through November 29th:

• Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Twitter used for machine to machine communication – Another use of Twitter – machine-to-machine communication. It's been bubbling for a while – the interesting thing will be if the facility to do it becomes more popular and mainstream.
• Tweetsgiving: Raising Money out of Thin Air | Pistachio – Nice look at Twitter use for established charities, and the example of Tweetgiving
• /Message: Edmodo: Educational Microstreaming… And More? – Educational tool around microblogging/sharing/streaming, with 'Teachers' able to create Groups and Events, upload files, create alerts etc. Posts all stream in the group, and in personal account of group members.
• With Twitter, a Desperate Need for Context – GigaOM –