Posted on Jul 24, 2008

More on Twitter and its clones

I found an interesting article on Twitter as a business today, which explains a bit of how they became successful and their problems with success. It wasn’t what got me into Twitter but it might be enough to convince a reader or two that it’s something worthwhile to investigate and/or try. Adam, I’m looking at you.

Quite a few people I know use applications like Adium, Meebo, or Pidgin to connect to various IM services, including AIM, MSN, Google Talk, and Facebook. While this is great for 1-on-1 messaging, it isn’t effective for viewing the public, “what are you doing” social concept that Twitter, identi.ca, and Facebook status all have in common. Eventually, those clients I named will come up with a solution. But until then, there is some room for a can-do-all social status application that groups Twitter and its clones together. There are lots of service-specific applications out there that post to Twitter or identi.ca but there is no superb knock-out application that groups everything together the way I want it to be done. I’ve been pondering creating something like this for either the iPhone or Mac OS X (or both). There’s lots to be learned from what already exists but there’s also a lot to be desired.

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