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Has Twitter Won the Microblogging War?
By Mark Evans | September 15, 2008
The always-analytical Louis Gray delivers some excellent micro-blogging insight, looking at how Twitter saw an 18% month-over-month increase in visitors last month. Meanwhile, new rivals - Identi.ca and Plurk.com - both lost traction while Friendfeed was flat.
Gray contends that Twitter has “won the microblogging battle” despite its technical struggles. Now, all Twitter needs to do is figure out is ways to make money.
Speaking of micro-blogging and money, I’ve been using Twifferic on my iPod Touch. While Twitterific has a premium product, the free version features an ad at the top.
To be honest, it’s not that intrusive, which really makes me wonder why Twitter has been so ad-phobic. I realize Twitter is building a large audience and working on a more solid infrastructure but at some point, you’ve got to turn a service into a business.
While Twitter continues to dominate the micro-blogging spotlight, it’s exciting to see vibrant competition. Yammer jumped into the scene last week as a Twitter-like version going after the corporate market, while Present.ly looks like a multi-feature corporate player as well.
Even Pownce is showing signs of life with a 17.4% increase in traffic last month. In an ideal world, Pownce wouldn’t be 1/15 the size of Twitter but at least it’s still alive and slowly growing.
Even more encouraging is Tumblr, which probably doesn’t as much attention as a micro-blogging platform. Tumblr’s traffic climbed nearly 14% in August to 878,330 visitors - one-third of Twitter’s audience.
Twitter may have, in fact, won the micro-blogging war but it still has plenty of competition, and likely more on the way.
Update: If you were looking yet another micro-blogging service to try, check out Fidj.it. It was reviewed by Mashable.
Technorati Tags: microbloggin, twitter
Topics: Blog Services |
