Webware

Every time I get invited to a new microblogging service, I cringe. Because once I try it (which, of course, I will; I can't help myself) and develop even a small network of people on it, I can't really leave. I don't want to be rude to people I've started to communicate with. And then I get mad.

Kwippy, the latest Twitter-alike

The latest sites to earn my wrath: Kwippy, Identi.ca, and Plurk. There's nothing inherently wrong with these services. They all have good features. Identi.ca is an open-source Twitter competitor; Kwippy integrates nicely with IM networks and has no character limit; Plurk has a neat timeline view and an addictive "karma" points system.

But, to my dismay, I have friends on each service (not so many on Kwippy, since it's the newest), not to mention last year's Twitter-alikes, Pownce and Jaiku. And there is just no way a person can participate in a half-dozen microblog services and do any of them justice, especially if he or she uses the services' sites alone. We've been here before, with IM networks (and we've seen solutions, like Trillian and Meebo). For microblogs, there are emerging solutions for people who want to participate on multiple services. Here are the solutions, but after this list I'll tell you why they don't work:

Solution 1: Link the accounts together. Many services will grab updates from others and post them to their own stream. For example, Pownce and Facebook both read my Twitter feeds. So I can update Twitter, and any followers I have on Pownce or Facebook also see what I am up to.

Solution 2: Use a multi-posting tool. You can update a dozen nanoblog services at once with Ping.FM. It's what I generally use when I want to reach all my followers on all my nanoblogs. There are other specialized multi-posting tools; for example, Twitterfeed, which lets you funnel RSS feeds into Twitter.

Solution 1 + 2 = Danger! It's easy to find yourself using both native cross-posting tools as well an independent multi-poster like Ping.FM. But if you do that, it's easy to double up on postings, and end up with the same item appearing in some places more than once. Dave Winer calls these duplicate posts "echoes." A solution is to just use Ping.FM, but then you have to remember to use it any time you want to post to more than one service.

Plurk's clever timeline view.

Here's the real problem with these solutions: Neither allows true participation in all the services at once. If you're using Ping.FM to update Twitter and Plurk, for example, and you want to read what your friends are doing on both of them, you have to visit both sites to see what's happening. Moreover, you have to use the services to reply to your friends' items on the services, and when you do that, your replies are limited to just that service.

Personal feed aggregator FriendFeed offers a partial solution to this issue: Conversations on FriendFeed that are based on Twitter posts can be fed back into Twitter. But FriendFeed doesn't post to every service it reads from, so conversations you have on it might not make it back to the originating site. FriendFeed also tends to hijack conversations from original sources, slowly stripping away their communities.

You can use the nanoblog client Twhirl to read and reply to posts on Twitter, FriendFeed, Identi.ca, and Seesmic. But again, any conversations you participate in on one service are limited to just that one. CEO Loic Le Meur has said he's working on tighter service integration in the software.

As long as entrepreneurs keep thinking that their precious new nanoblog features deserve new networks to support them, we are going to have this problem. There is the potential that a unified authentication system like OpenID or Facebook Connect could go part of the way toward solving the issue, eventually. But to be clear, there's no real reason today that any entrepreneur should capitulate to Twitter or any other service in this growing market. We're in a Wild West stage of nanoblog expansion, which means that for users trying to get keep their friends in just one or two social networking corrals, things will likely get worse before they get better.

Meanwhile, I have found, as have many other geeks have, that FriendFeed offers the best combination of content and community. Follow me here. And this, by the way, illustrates the solution to the current free-for-all expansion of the nanoblog market: Find a service you like, and convince your friends to join it.

Swurl is a service for people who want to create a blog made from their activity on various social-media services. Like FriendFeed, SocialThing, or any other aggregator, you start building your Swurl blog by plugging in your usernames on each service. There are currently 19 to choose from, with all the usual suspects like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Yelp.

What's nice is that Swurl will retroactively seek out all your old posts and filter them in. Each post is set up by your day of activity, so if you didn't add anything to any of these services there simply won't be a post. You can also view your entire stream of activity in a large calendar, called a "timeline" that can be perused by year. (Check out mine here.)

Besides aggregating your news feed, Swurl has a social component that lets you do the same with others. You can follow other users just like you would with Twitter or Tumblr, and their streams of information will show up in chronological order in the friends tab. You're also able to see their friends list, and dig into their timelines to view their past activity.

There's already an active community of Swurlers using the service. Advanced users should also not shy away from what seems like a very simple tool; you can drop in custom CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), tweak the colors, and look and feel of your page to a very high degree.

One thing missing is a way to create entirely new posts through Swurl, so it's definitely not attempting to take over standard blogging platforms. FriendFeed, which essentially does the same thing as Swurl, will aggregate your business from all these networks and also manages to add its own publishing tool to boot. There is no such system on Swurl at the moment, but there should be.

[via Lifehacker]

Swurl turns your social activity stream into both a blog and this handy timeline. Here you can see shared pictures on Twitter, links on Delicious, and Twitter tweets--all on the same page.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Twitter's recent reliability issues and downtime have left a hole in the nanoblog market, to the extent that such a market actually exists. Among the bloggerati, FriendFeed is filling in the vaccuum and could become the new Twitter. It's got a good feedback system and it also has features that make finding and adding friends very easy. And FriendFeed reads in Twitter content, so users can have the best of both worlds.

Now there's an even newer Twitter clone: Plurk (about the name). Its big advantage is its user interface. You get a slick timeline view of all the posts from your friends. The system also has a good design for adding friends by finding them on your other buddy lists (AIM, Yahoo IM, Gmail, etc.). Also, there's a good method for responding to Plurk posts that shows you a conversation thread laid on top of the timeline. You can also post videos, photos, and links easily. And there's a decent grouping function for segmenting out sections of your friend list.

Plurk has an attractive timeline view, a karma system, in-line comments, and many other nice nanoblog features (click to enlarge).

It is a great interface for a nanoblog service, although it works best on a full-screen browser. There is a nicely done mobile version at plurk.com/m, but it doesn't give you all the visual candy.

Unfortunately, Plurk has a bit of Twitteritis: It's not the most reliable service on the planet. An influx of users over the weekend (which is being blamed on or credited to Leo Laporte) has apparently overloaded the system, and occasionally users may find elements of it not working.

The bigger issue with a service like this, though, is the network of users. Yes, Plurk looks great and has very strong features. So do Jaiku and Pownce. But Twitter is where people hang out, at least for now, assuming Twitter can fix its reliability issues.

Also, by focusing on the user interface to such a great extent and ahead of building an API, Plurk discourages developers from building their own clients (like Twhirl for Twitter), some of which could make the service more attractive to important subsets of users. (Although, to be fair, separation of interface and service hasn't done much for Twitter.)

Plurk is a creative nanoblog service but feels a bit redundant in the Twitter/FriendFeed era. There is the chance it could open up the nanoblog concept to a new group of users not on the current platforms, though.

You can follow me on Plurk or join up yourself.

See also: If Twitter weren't bad enough, now there's open-source Twoorl.

Twitter clones have been aplenty since the service launched in mid-2006. Many have come out offering more, foregoing some of the simplicity that made Twitter popular to begin with (see Poodz and Pownce). However, one that's just cropped up, called Adocu, is almost a joke, ditching the 160-character cap and only limiting messages to whatever you can fit inside of one (sometimes giant) word.

Users are encouraged to string multiple words together. You can fit nearly whatever you want as long as there are no spaces. OK, however, are dashes, apostrophes, commas, and periods--meaning you can add some order to your words if you'd like. My guess, though, is that the creators wanted to instill an even greater sense of minimalism to the point of removing whatever capitalization you throw into your messages.

iamcompletelyserious.

It's unlikely that the niche of people willing to use Twitter right now want to ditch that community for Adocu's. There's currently no API, no way to search for friends, or any sort of mobile interface, which is very necessary with a service like this. One thing Adocu does have going for it is that it's fast and peppy, something Twitter has been struggling with lately.

No spaces, you say? That's how Adocu gets down, with one-word limitations on all your psuedo-Tweets.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Seesmic (review), which is working towards the public release of its video nanoblogging and chat service, has acquired Twhirl, an AIR-based Twitter client. Twhirl is the most popular third-party client according to ReadWriteWeb, accounting for about 7% of messages sent on the service.

Meet Seesmic's new desktop client app.

Twhirl was developed by Marco Kaiser in Germany. It's the first AIR app he wrote, and he did it as a side project. Kaiser will stay in Germany as a new employee of Seesmic. It's been a busy week for him, apparently: His wife also had a baby this week.

In my opinion, Twhirl (review) is the best way to use Twitter. But that position is hardly secure. Heavy Twitter users are fickle and often switch apps when newer and better ones come along. I say that based on experience as well as observation.

But Twhirl is several steps ahead of the competition. It already cross-posts to Twitter-alikes Pownce and Jaiku, and Kaiser was already working on integration with Seesmic when that comany's founder, Loic Le Meur, approached him with the acquisition offer. (See Le Meur's blog post regarding the acquisition.)

Kaiser's app will now evolve into Seesmic's official desktop client, and the first Seesmic-enabled version of it will ship in two to three weeks, Le Meur told me. Seesmic, which is still in private beta, will open up to public access before that version of Twhirl becomes available.

Twhirl will continue to support Twitter, and Le Meur has no plans to add text nanoblogging to Seesmic. His service is all about video, he says.

Seesmic's video service is often compared to Twitter since it encourages short-form back-and-forth commentary, as Twitter does, and its social architecture is similar: You "follow" people whose results you want to see, and they can follow you back. That should make the mechanics of using one client to access both Twitter and Seesmic at least potentially workable; but we'll have to see how well it operates in practice.

Despite Twhirl's importance in the Twitter ecosystem, it is not a huge app by normal software standards: It's been downloaded only about 100,000 times since its first release, Le Meur said. Despite the buzz in and about Twitter, the nanoblog market is still very immature.

I've been experimenting with the new nanoblog platform, Utterz. It's being compared to Twitter (and Pownce and Jaiku), although it has much better mobile multimedia support. But it's really better used as a utility for getting media--voice, pictures, and video--from your mobile phone to your existing social network or blog pages.

I've heard this idea before (see mEgo): You embed x widget into your pages on all the social networks you use, then to update them all, all you have to do is send your content into the widget. And there are certainly other mobile blogging platforms: see 3Guppies and Twango.

Utterz combines media items sent separately (inside blue boxes) into individual posts. Clever.

Utterz' special power is the way it takes media from your mobile and intelligently combines it as it sends it to the platform. Also, you don't need a mobile Web browser to publish on the Utterz platform. For example, if you send a cameraphone image via MMS into the system, and then a few minutes later dial the Utterz number and speak a message, those two items will, by default, get combined into one post, presumably because you're most likely describing the photo you just took.

In addition to embedding posts in a widget, Utterz items can be posts unto themselves. You can easily connect your account to mainstream blogging platforms such as Blogger, LiveJournal, and Wordpress.

The system will also post directly to your blog.

I like Utterz as a conduit for getting audio/video media from a mobile phone to a blog or social network page. Utterz also has a social network of its own: Like Twitter and other nanoblog systems, you can set up a group of friends on the site, then track the posts from your friends. I wonder if the world needs yet another Twitter-alike, no matter how good its media chops. But if your friends aren't on an existing nanoblog network, well, now everyone in your group has yet another choice.

Utterz is accessible from a mobile phone via its voice and dialpad interface. It will play voice Utterz and convert text Utterz to speech if you dial up the service to find what people are posting. However, there's as yet no good way to access Utterz from a mobile browser; the site is designed for full-size screens.

You can also get Utterz as a Facebook app, but its integration isn't fully cooked yet; you have to log in to Utterz from within your already-logged-in Facebook sessions. There are other annoyances in the product, but nothing unfixable. There's also no API for Utterz yet, but I'm told it is forthcoming.

The product makes money whenever you call the service to leave a voice Utter: It's not a free call, and Utterz gets a slice of the revenue.

Utterz is run by Michael Bayer of RPM Communications, which also makes the free conference call platform, Foonz (review).

Check out my Utterz widget after the jump.

... Read more

Frengo is a newish nanoblog service that makes it easy to both subscribe to topic areas and to create your own feeds. Compared to somewhat similar services (Twitter, Jaiku, and Pownce), it has a few twists. For one, it's built for the 16-to-30 demographic and is thus a big SMS play. The Frengo founders also have good connections with the mobile carriers, and have managed to get carriers (notably Sprint subbrand Boost) onboard with the service.

It's easy to find content on Frengo.

As the carriers are raising their a la carte per-message rates on SMS in order to push people into all-you-can-eat bucket plans for text messaging, you know they've got to love Frengo's SMS-centric model. If you're not careful on Frengo, you can quickly find yourself deluged with horoscopes, sports news, and quizzes about celebrities. It's easy enough to turn off the mobile notifications and get updates on the Web only, but for a few minutes after you sign up for these services, your phone is going to be buzzing like mad. A WAP-based version is in the works.

Frengo's other trick: It bribes its users by awarding points for activities, like signing up friends. These points can be redeemed for prizes, such as ringtones and prepaid phone cards, all the way up to iPods and Xboxes.

I am of two minds on Frengo. I like the Web service. In addition to creating text updates, it has other post types. You create polls and quizzes, which can be fun. (See also Pownce, which lets you create file-transfer posts, link posts, and invitations.) Frengo also has a directory model that other nanoblog tools lack. When you want to sign up for content, Frengo makes it easy to find it.

You can easily create an SMS poll.

The service also let you put your friends in groups (as does Pownce) and select who gets the updates that you write.

On the other hand, I really don't like the way the points system, the friend invitation system (it asks for friends' mobile numbers), and the SMS focus of Frengo all collude to drive up SMS adoption and to get people to use--and pay for--more messaging services. While it's likely that a service like this, built hand-in-glove with the carriers, will grow its user base much more quickly than a crunchy-granola startup such as Twitter or Pownce, I feel it's manipulative, and that alone will keep me off the service. (And as a current Twitter and Pownce user, I am not about to start managing yet another circle of nanoblog friends.)

Still, Frengo looks like a decent business, which is more than you can say for most of the current nanoblog services. I would not be surprised to see it win a large number of users.

Featured on this week's Real Deal podcast: Twitter alternatives. Since our episode on Twitter back in May, a lot has changed in the world of nanoblogs. Twitter is not the only fruit. There's Jaiku and Pownce, both good competitors to Twitter. There's Facebook, which already has a "status" feature. And there are services like Profilactic and Twitterfeed for aggregating your status feeds (Jaiku is also a good aggregator). In just 15 minutes, Tom and I run through the options.

Here's the stream:

If you want to join the ongoing discussion, come on over to the Real Deal forums .

Real Deal subscription links:

• For RSS readers: http://www.cnet.com/i/pod/realdeal.xml
• iTunes: Subscribe

Pownce (review), the new nanoblogging service that doubles as a person-to-person file transfer product, is often compared to Twitter. Both products enable you to "nanoblog" quick updates on what you're doing. But the products have fundamental and important differences, and if you're curious about which one you should be using, you need to know about them. (Jaiku is also an important product in this space; more on it further down.)

Stick with your friends

The big issue: It has nothing do to with design or features. It's the community. Your community. If you want to use one of these services, use the one your friends are using. Trying to keep up with multiple nanoblog services will drive you insane (I'm tracking several this morning as I write this story, and trying to keep up is nearly destroying my ability to focus). Trying to get friends who are established on one network to join you on a new one is a fool's errand. You might get some to come with you, but there's no doubt that you'll leave others behind.

Any post in Pownce can become a standalone discussion. Very cool.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

In Web 2.0 circles, Twitter is the nanoblog service to use. I admit that I say that partly because I have hundreds of followers there and don't want to leave them for another service. Pownce is growing rapidly as people get invitations and try it out, but everyone who leaves Twitter for Pownce is going to be leaving friends behind.

On the other hand, if you're starting from zero, give Pownce a serious look, especially if you're thinking of using it in a work setting. With Pownce, you can easily set up a group of contacts, and use the service to keep co-workers up to date on what you're doing as well as the latest versions of documents you're working on. Also in Pownce, replies to particular nanoblog entries are easily tracked in their own threads, on their own pages. If something you write starts a discussion, it's much easier to keep track of what people are saying than it is on Twitter. Again, this is a great feature for business users.

Tradeoffs

The practical downside to Pownce, right now, is its lack of support for mobile devices. Twitter works nicely on mobile Web browsers, and also via SMS and IM if you care to use it that way. Twitter is also more open to developers, and there are several services that offer alternative (non-Web-based) interfaces to it. I use Twitteroo. Pownce has a decent desktop client on its own, though.

Pownce and Twitter are not your only options for nanoblogging. Jaiku is also worth exploring. It has several of Pownce's cool features, like discussion tracking, as well as a nice mobile client for Nokia phones. It's also a very useful aggregator of nanoblog feeds. If you feed it the RSS feeds that Pownce and Twitter publish, you can have your own universal nanoblog. For example, here's mine: rafe.jaiku.com. It takes everything I write in Twitter, Pownce, and Webware, as well as my Flickr photos, and puts it all in one place. It doesn't update frequently enough, but it's a powerful service.

And you can't talk about nanoblogging without taking Facebook into account. Facebook lets you track what your friends are doing on your own Facebook page, and thanks to Facebook's new open platform, other services (including Twitter and Pownce) can now update your Facebook feed. There's a good chance Facebook will become even more useful as a social hub as the teams making other apps tweak them to work even better on the Facebook service.

Final note: Dear Meebo people, Can you please add these nanoblog systems to your Web-based instant message aggregator service? Thanks.

Related links: Mashable has a nice rundown of eight "miniblog" services. See also our Newbie's Guide to Twitter.