I hate to admit it, but it takes me a while to try new things online. Twitter’s been mainstream for about a year and a half now, and I just joined last month. I guess you could say I like to wait until new technology has been test-driven before I try it. I just got a Prius, and I’ve wanted one for a few years now, but I wanted to wait until Toyota worked out all the bugs in it. I don’t want to get into an accident due to something that wasn’t known until my accident! Yes, I know that’s a bit overdramatic for social networking sites like Twitter, but I stand by my analogy.
I say Twitter’s been “mainstream” because it actually started as a research project by San Francisco start-up Obvious in 2006. It was first used only by employees to communicate with each other. In April 2007, Obvious spun off what would become “Twitter.” Anyhoo, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that lets users read other people’s updates on what they’re doing or what they’re thinking, in real time. These updates are known as tweets, and they’re short messages of up to 140 characters.
Micro-blogging differs from traditional blogging due to the limited space of 140 characters. Micro-blogs can include short messages about personal matters, commentary to another person, how someone is feeling or it can just be a link dump. Here are three more just like Twitter.
Pownce
Another social networking and micro-blogging site is Pownce. Twitter is by far the most popular micro-blogging site, but Pownce has its fair share of users. The difference is that Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events and links with people you already know. This site debuted in January 2008.
Pownce has been called “Twitter on steroids,” and employees like it over Twitter because it has discussion-tracking capabilities. Pownce was started by Digg.com founder Kevin Rose along with three other developers.
Plurk
Another site you might want to check out if you don’t care for Twitter is Plurk.com. It references itself as a “social journal for your life.” Instead of tweets, your updates are called plurks, and are limited to 140 characters, which is the max for micro-blogging.
Plurk is still a newbie compared to Twitter; it launched in May 2008. That means I’m going to wait to check it out and let others be the guinea pigs. The nice thing about Plurk is that you can share video, images and other media.
Spoink
Spoink is another competitor, founded in 2007. Spoink’s big feature is enabling users to podcast by phone from anywhere as well as post photos, video, audio and text. You stay in touch with people through podcasts, really, more so than text.
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