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)

I’m in the process of collating various posts and search into the effect of Twitter on the link economy for a post later this week – but I want to include your views and comments.

It’s been sparked by a few things – including the the fact that despite receiving the same amount of traffic to both my blogs, and numerous Retweets, the ranking of them by various lists has gone down. And much of this seems to be due to a lower amount of inbound links as measured by Technorati and Yahoo.

In the grand scheme of things, the only reason measures of popularity are important for my personal blogs is it makes it easier for people to find them via search or relevant lists, allowing me to hopefully meet and interact with more people (I’m not aiming to build a media empire at the moment!).

But are you seeing the same things happening?

Do you wish Google/Technorati etc started counting Retweets as a metric of authority for a website?

Do you think the effect is proportional to the time you invest of social networks rather than interacting via blogs?

Does it matter to you?

First an official Google account appeared on Twitter:

But now Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been uncovered, having had an account for almost a month.

Definitely some validation for Twitter – which also hit 8 million U.S users.

It’s fun to hypothesis that Google, perhaps, is on Twitter as a customer service exercise – after all, they owned Jaiku, and the differences between the two services are fairly open and obvious, so it isn’t a research mission.

But Zuckerberg is even more interesting – Facebook already had an offer turned down for Twitter, so it’s unlikely he’s trying before he buys. And Facebook has also unveiled changes that seem to be partly in response to the real-time nature of Twitter.

Perhaps he sees it as an additional communication channel that is worth spending some time with, or perhaps he just fancied some fun by trying to see how long he could be anonymous?

Personally I’m just excited (and surprised) by the fact that for some strange reason, he’s decided to follow me!

The first is my contribution to the debate on whether Twitter and the real-time web will replace Google. I couldn’t decide which blog to post it on, as it crosses over to both my sites, so apologies for the linkage.

So to brighten things up with something more light-hearted:

Get your Status on a T-Shirt with Twitoshirt

That’s right, you can now quickly and easily post your favourite status message at Twitoshirt, and then proudly wear your (or someone else’s) genius for just $16.99.

Whether or not you’d want to might be another matter.

But it does make me wonder if I should revive the Tweet of the Week, and if I’ve missed a business opportunity there!

You do remember there are some microblogging networks other than Twitter?

If so, and you have an iPhone, you’ll be happy to know that there’s an official Plurk application, iPlurk, now available via the App store. Ironically for a service that differentiates itself from Twitter with a horizontal timeline and more graphical interface, both aspects have been dropped for the iPhone – then again, if you’re already engaged with the Plurk community, it might make more sense for a lighter interface to update when you’re on the move?

Meanwhile, the Google-owned Jaiku now has it’s own app, developed by third party mJaiku.  It’s got most of the features you’d expect to find, although a test by Darnell Clayton over at Blog Herald reveals that it doesn’t support domain shortening, which may be a significant pain in use. But the good thing is you can contact the developer via Jaiku at raiglstorfer

It feels weird to publish a post effectively blowing our own trumpets, but this was too good not to share. A quick look around for other interesting sites covering microblogging revealed 140char.com is the #1 return for a Google search for ‘microblogging blog’.

Wahey!

That would be the almighty Wikipedia below us!

To justify the post a bit more, I did a quick bit of playing around for the following searches:

‘microblogging blog’ 1,250,000 results.

‘twitter blog’ 41,600,000 results. (And we’re nowhere near as high!)

‘jaiku blog’ 3,830,000 results.

‘pownce blog’ 2,570,000 results.

‘plurk blog’ 2,460,000 results.

‘identi.ca blog’ 392,000 results.

‘yammer blog’ 258,000 results.

A quick look at Google Trends echoes these results. I won’t embed the graph because Twitter skews it so far that everything else is just a blurred line at the bottom.

However:

It’ll be interesting to see whether open source microblogging and services which can be manually deployed behind the corporate firewall is demanded as much as enterprise options set-up and hosted by a third party. I suspect the current data is skewed somewhat by the mentions of Yammer winning the TechCrunch 50!