Do We Really Need More Microblogs?
It seems a week doesn’t go by without me hearing about a new microblogging service. Very likely, there are a dozen others I don’t hear about. But every time I see one I think, ‘haven’t we been through this before?’
It reminds me of the heyday of social networking sites, when every man and his dog would build a new site with a minor tweak in the hope that it would rise to the top. This culminated in the creation of Ning, a service designed to build such sites for you.
While some niche social networking sites have achieved modest success, for the most part, they don’t work, because it’s just too much trouble to maintain your identity across so many sites. Such services can easily be replicated within Facebook, for example, with a group or an applicaton on the Facebook Platform.
The need for niche microblogging sites, however, is even less apparent than the nonexistent one for niche social networking sites. With the exception of a few services (like Yammer, which is designed for corporate use, and Pownce, which allowed sharing of various media in conjunction with text, and is dead now anyway) these services are just Twitter clones centered around a particular topic.
There are all sorts of ways to handle this within Twitter. Hashtags allow messages to be tagged as relevant to a particular discussion. There are third party extensions which allow conversations to be tracked. Using another site is unnecessary, and any new service is going to have to rebuild its community.
Eventually, though, it’s going to come down to the fact that no-one is going to keep sending messages through multiple microblogs, because it is tiresome. Once people get past the novelty of all the different sites, they’re going to settle on one. And it’s going to be Twitter.
