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A belated look at a recent report from comScore which shows Twitter is the fastest growing social network on mobile, with growth of 347% since 2009.

The number of users in January 2010 reached 4.7 million – compared to just over 1 million in January 2009, giving a 4.47 multiple increase. Twitter’s 347% growth compares with Facebooks 112% (But Facebook still rules with 25 million mobile users), and Myspace declining 7%.

But to be 1/5th of Facebooks size and growing 3 times as quickly shows Twitter is looking even more promising on mobile than on the fixed internet.

Twidroid is a popular Twitter application for Android phones, and they’ve just released an update, including native Youtube posting, a sample pluging for your own url shortener, Chinese, Czech, Russian and Arabic languages, plus the Pro version now has offline sending, which is a useful addition.

Catch up with the full release notes.

Posterous straddles the bridge between microblogging and lifestreaming, and although founder Sachin Agarwal definitely prefers the latter description, I’m guessing it’s of interest to you – both as a place to post and aggregate content, but also as a method for sending content out to other sites, such as Twitter.

In any case, it’s first iPhone application is now available, and PicPosterous provides an alternative to emailing all your updates.

You can send content, particularly images and videos, before you’ve registered for an account, which will mean one is automatically created for you, and visual content can also be added to an album without starting a new post.

You can’t forward links or plain text to the site, which is potentially frustrating, and another niggle is that you don’t have any control over your autoposting settings via the app, besides turning them on or off.

But, as always with Posterous, the focus is on keeping things incredibly quick and simple, and then building on that, so I’m sure the feature list will improve fairly quickly over time.

I’ve just signed up for a new site offering micro-recommendations via web and mobile, Goodrec, after picking up on it via Scobleizer (Who has a great video interview with the CEO, Mihar Shah)

It looks like a good service, although as you can see I’ve just started playing with it.

But what’s interesting to me is that 50% of their traffic comes from mobile, and mobile is a big part of their offering, with recommendations around your location, for example.

The reason I’m so interested in the mobile aspect is that it’s the main difference (along with restaurant and nightlife reviews) from Blippr, a micro-recommendation service whose creators I interviewed back in September.

• Both focus on allowing short form reviews.
• Both include categories for Entertainment.
• Both have a pretty simple rating option, with up to 160 characters for the actual review.

But the big difference is that Goodrec appears to have had mobile in mind from the start, especially with location-based services. Blippr, meanwhile, had a user suggest an iPhone app seven months ago on it’s Get Satisfaction page, and a lot of postive feedback from other users, but the staff replies explain that with one developer, the decision was to focus more on the site. Blippr has exposed it’s API in case a third-party wished to create something, but the most recent work has been a host of improvements to the site itself (details are on the Blippr blog)

Choosing between the two is a tough call – from emailing and Tweeting with the guys behind Blippr, I can appreciate what they’re doing immensely – but without having the resources to develop mobile-based recommendations they’ve left themselves widely open. After all, mobile integration is a major adoption attraction of Twitter.

So combine Mobile with location-based recommendations, and I think Goodrec has launched with a sizeable advantage.

It will be interesting to see if Blippr respond, if anyone else joins the space, and in particular, whether Twitter itself has any plans in the area linked to monetising.

(I’m also on Blippr, although not particularly active).

So far, much of the focus on microblogging has been on text, with the one major exception of Seesmic. But using Seesmic as a producer requires a certain amount of effort. It also lends itself to video blog type discussions.

Hence interest around the private alpha launch of 12 Seconds, limiting video uploads in the same manner as Twitter and Plurk et al limit the amount of text.

Updates are by webcam or mobile phone, and there’s no scientific reasoning disclosed behind the 12 second limit, although apparently “Our patent pending Electro-Tear-Duct Prongers have determined that exactly 12 seconds of video is the ideal amount of time to keep anything interesting.”

What is also quite interesting is that the people behind 12 Seconds are open about: “The more we can get 12seconds off of the 12seconds.tv site the better. We are building a platform for video status. We want these clips to be anywhere you are, or at least anywhere you want them to be.” So widgets are already available for Myspace and blogs, and more distribution is doubtless on the way…

It’s worth taking a look to see how much information can be conveyed in 12 seconds via video. My only question about the service is that it successfully replicates the upload portion of microblogging – but are there mechanisms for replying to people, and forming groups? Those are the things that have driven Twitter, Friendfeed and all the famous social networks. If I see 12 seconds that are worthy of praise, comment or argument, I want to be able to respond directly via the service – not have to track people down by alternative means.

Take a look at the site, and share your thoughts below…

One of the great things about the current web revolution is that as soon as a website/application appears, someone clever figures out ways to tweak it to improve on it for their needs.

And so, as many people are discovering Plurk, TwisterMC aka Thomas McMahon, has already created a sidebar plugin for Firefox 2 and 3, to use the simplified mobile version of Plurk.

It comes with the Plurk logo of a headless ‘thing’ and a keyboard shortcut. The actual functionality of the sidebar is down to Plurk, and it’s being download right now for a test.

I’ve seen a couple of rumours that Plurk’s creators are too keen on third party applications being developed – perhaps down to Twitter’s downtime problems and the fact 90% of requests to Twitters database comes from external applications. But we’ll see…

Dan Thornton on Plurk.

Julius Solaris on Plurk

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