According to Neilsen Netratings, social network traffic continues to grow (as does social media in general.) Despite their growing pains and downtime more and more people seem to find their way onto sites like Twitter and Facebook. What’s shocking is that Twitter has suffered some SIGNIFICANT downtime issues and yet, continues to grow in spite of it’s efforts to keep people away. I find this remarkable because Twitter isn’t the only game in town. Tumblr, Plurk, and Jaiku all have the potential to dethrone Twitter (as does FriendFeed according to some, but I can’t stand the interface.) I’ve tried the other microblog networks and here are my thoughts on each:

Tumblr. I really like Tumblr. It represents what web 2.0 was all about - easy to use web technology with social capabilities. Tumblr is a cross between Wordpress and Twitter, which unfortunately makes it too much like a blog to compete with Twitter, and not enough like a blog for a real blogger. It ranks pretty well on Google searches, it allows you to create groups and network with other users (like Twitter,) and most importantly it’s REALLY easy to use. It’s not going to unseat Twitter, but it’s fun to play with.

Plurk. If you haven’t checked it out yet, Plurk is a direct challenge to Twitter. It’s a microblog social network but instead of following the layout of blogs and Twitter, and newspapers and ancient scrolls, Plurk scrolls left-to-right in what they call a “timeline”. Yawn. It was cute, and then it was over. I like that they are trying to do something different, and are not following the same paradigm set by Twitter - I really respect that. But it just doesn’t make me want to spend time updating another network. For SEO, it’s not as good as Tumblr or Twitter and I don’t see that it’s a compelling alternative to Twitter. But it’s new, so people are talking about it.

Jaiku. Talk about a golden opportunity missed. Jaiku offers a microblog social network very similar to Twitter, with some pretty cool features. While Twitter was looking like it may never stabilize and presenting the “fail whale” to it’s users more often than their profiles, Jaiku was taking a long hot bath and reading War and Peace. Then it took a nap. Somewhere around that time, Google bought it and since then I believe it’s been out walking the dog. I’ll never understand what made Jaiku not jump all over Twitter’s failures, but it never lifted it’s private beta period and continues to invite a (relatively) small number of people to participate in the network. With all the attention on social networking and social media marketing, not to mention the mainstream press Twitter was getting for it’s downtime, if Jaiku doesn’t start opening the floodgates to microblog users it may soon see itself as the Ask.com of microblogs to Twitter’s Google.

By the way, I have 15 Jaiku beta invites to share to anyone who is interested.

Tags: jaiku, microblog, Social Media Marketing, social-media, social-networking-tools, twitter

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 5:25 am and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.