There’s an interesting article on Slate.com about the dangers of having one company – Twitter – dominate the microblogging world.
Citing last week’s hacker attack that crippled Twitter, Farhad Manjoo argues that Twitter is far too centralized. This not only makes it vulnerable to attacks and outages but puts an increasingly critical communications medium at risk for millions of people.
Manjoo suggests that a decentralized ecosystem be introduced – something people such as Dave Winer have been advocating for a long time.
Another market consideration is the emergence of alternatives to Twitter. Sure, there’s Yammer, Plurk and Present.ly but they’re small players whose market share is a fraction of Twitter’s. As well, Yammer and Present.ly are focused on the enterprise market – a market that Twitter has happily ignored.
So even if Twitter is attacked by hackers, and goes down for hours or days, there’s really no where for people to go if they want to jump on to another microblogging service.
You would think that entrepreneurs – and venture capitalists – would be all over this opportunity to take a competitive swipe at Twitter.
I mean, there’s no lack of start-ups trying to go head-to-head with Google, and the browser market has pretty vibrant competition Heck, Marc Andressessen is backing a new browser start-up called RockMelt.
So, where are the start-ups willing to take on Twitter? Did the demise of Pownce eliminate the only viable contender and, in the process, convince people that Twitter is invincible?
What do you think? Is there another microblogging service that has what it takes to be an alternative to Twitter?
5 Comments
Mark, I'd love to get you up to speed on Socialtext and Socialtext Signals, as we're winning accounts over the other "enterprise twitters" weekly. http://www.socialtext.com/products/signals.php
Customers don't want "yet another stand alone tool" in their enterprise that does one thing, and that employees must learn. They love how Signals is part of our integrated collaboration (wikis, blogs, etc) and social networking (people) platform. They also love the security and convenience of our appliance running behind their own firewall.
Sorry, this was not intended to sound like a commercial, but that is my job
Mark, you have forgotten about Canada's own Status.net – the folks behind Identica and Laconica. They are just getting going, but the power and leverage of an open source business model will be very powerful.
Mark,
You're right. Thanks for jumping into the conversation!
Interesting question Mark! If Microblogging continues to escalate, and new players jump in to be competitive, then all we'll see is the same thing that happened to the islands created with IM. Then eventually, they'll consolidate by providing interoperability. But, for the IM providers, it was too late. By the time they realized the potential, the users had gone to something else (Twitter?).
Twitter, is universal and ubiquitous, that is why it has become so pervasive so quickly. They will likely fix the infrastructure problem. I think others should join it (like Facebook and other user applications are attempting to do) and capitalize on the strength of its concept. Twitter is a one to many communications platform. Applications should be built to capitalize on that platform. Over time, it will grow like the telephone networks did with various providers all sharing a common, interoperable infrastructure. Competition should come from access to the platform and distribution of the messaging, not by trying to replace it.
Twitter could provide a similar value proposition for microblogging that RIM originally provided to mobile email. RIM controlled all email traffic to and from RIM devices through it's networks. And when RIM had an outage, the ramifications were (and still are) significant. But, because of competitive technologies, this has now opened up to other providers. If RIM had opened up it's networks to other smartphone and email service providers, we might very well have a different smartphone / mobile email landscape today.
I cross-post on several different microblogs via Ping.fm, and it seems like besides Twitter, my next most popular one is Plurk. Posterous is also a relatively new one that many of the PR gurus seem to be flocking to.