I hate to admit it, but it takes me a while to try new things online. Twitter’s been mainstream for about a year and a half now, and I just joined last month. I guess you could say I like to wait until new technology has been test-driven before I try it. I just got a Prius, and I’ve wanted one for a few years now, but I wanted to wait until Toyota worked out all the bugs in it. I don’t want to get into an accident due to something that wasn’t known until my accident! Yes, I know that’s a bit overdramatic for social networking sites like Twitter, but I stand by my analogy.
I say Twitter’s been “mainstream” because it actually started as a research project by San Francisco start-up Obvious in 2006. It was first used only by employees to communicate with each other. In April 2007, Obvious spun off what would become “Twitter.” Anyhoo, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users read other people’s updates on what they’re doing or what they’re thinking, in real time. These updates are known as tweets, and they’re short messages of up to 140 characters.
Micro-blogging differs from traditional blogging due to the limited space of 140 characters. Micro-blogs can include short messages about personal matters, commentary to another person, how someone is feeling or it can just be a link dump. Here are three more just like Twitter.
Pownce
Another social networking and micro-blogging site is Pownce. Twitter is by far the most popular micro-blogging site, but Pownce has its fair share of users. The difference is that Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events and links with people you already know. This site debuted in January 2008.
Pownce has been called “Twitter on steroids,” and employees like it over Twitter because it has discussion-tracking capabilities. Pownce was started by Digg.com founder Kevin Rose along with three other developers.
Plurk
Another site you might want to check out if you don’t care for Twitter is Plurk.com. It references itself as a “social journal for your life.” Instead of tweets, your updates are called plurks, and are limited to 140 characters, which is the max for micro-blogging.
Plurk is still a newbie compared to Twitter; it launched in May 2008. That means I’m going to wait to check it out and let others be the guinea pigs. The nice thing about Plurk is that you can share video, images and other media.
Spoink
Spoink is another competitor, founded in 2007. Spoink’s big feature is enabling users to podcast by phone from anywhere as well as post photos, video, audio and text. You stay in touch with people through podcasts, really, more so than text.
First, email was too much. Too much info, too much time. Then we used MySpace and Facebook to keep in touch with our social networks. Now, even those have gotten to be too much. Who has time to create personal, long blogs to let her social circle know what’s going on? IM-ing is too time-consuming because you have to interact with everyone individually. Entering stage right: Microblogging!
Microblogging is like IM, but instead of messaging just one person, you message everyone in your social network at one time. Twitter and Plurk are two popular microblogging sites, in case you think you’ve never heard of microblogging. You’ve probably heard of one of these sites, right?
Microblogging is a way to let your friends know what you’re doing at all times. It’s kind of like the “status” feature on MySpace. Using Twitter, for instance, allows you to let everyone in your social network know what you are up to in that precise moment. Right now, in my Twitter profile I’ve got “Working on a blog, laundry is going, dog is snoring under my chair.” Fascinating, I’m sure. But, isn’t “What are you doing?” the first thing we ask when we call up a friend? And the answer we give is basically what goes into Twitter and other personal microblogging sites. But more and more microblogging sites are cropping up that are getting more business than personal.
Yammer is a site that answers the question “What are you working on?” for those in the corporate world. The nice thing is that you can screen those outside of your company so that only your co-workers know what you’re working on. So why would Yammer and other microblogging sites be useful to the corporate world?
People are starting to ignore their email. People’s inboxes are filling up at a much faster rate nowadays, so much so that many emails are ignored for days at a time. With microblogging, you often don’t have enough room to be longwinded, so you can let people know what you’re doing in a sentence or two. If you’re working on a project with a boss that likes to call every half hour to get an update, you can just microblog your status. This also helps to deflect any annoying “check-in” phone calls that turn into “By the way, can you also do this or add this?”
It’s easier to store info. Many companies trap their knowledge in PowerPoints or in one top dog’s email that gets deleted after said top dog leaves the company. Companies are starting to upload content onto company Wikis, which can then be linked to and indexed by conversational microblogs. Now it’s getting useful, and we can’t have that! Something that was intended for fun being business-oriented!? The horror!
Managers can see who their “connectors” are. The connectors are the people who control the flow of info through the department or company. If the managers see that there are only one or two people that are distributing info, they can add other connectors, or narrow down who is diluting or screwing up company messages.
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