Article on failed microblogging services published in PC Live! in April 2010
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With the phenomenal success of micro-blogging, it’s not surprising that others have attempted to take on Twitter’s monopoly of the sector. Competitors have developed services with bigger and better features, however, that alone has not been enough to take down Jack Dorsey’s brainchild. The most important aspect of social networking is about sustaining membership and involvement in the community, so without user-generated content, the service is doomed to fail.
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Jaiku was seen as one of Twitter’s biggest competitors a few years ago. It was created in 2006 by Finish developers Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen. While it was rather similar to Twitter, it had many stand out features. It allowed users to import other websites’ feeds to their own blogs. Jaiku’s Lifestreaming application shared users’ actions on sites like Flickr and Last.fm and let them promote their online activities to their followers. This app also could read your location, based on names given by mobile phone towers. The service had mobile SMS integration, a more polished user interface with threaded comments and channels to separate conversations.
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With it’s rapidly increasing user-base, along with popular tech figure Leo Laporte leaving Twitter for it, Jaiku had earned itself an impressive following. It’s downfall began in 2008 when purchased by Google. Since the acquisition, the development team’s blog went silent. The service slowed down to unusable levels and called up several gateway errors. It was announced that Jaiku would be ported to the Google Apps Engine, but by then, the server’s issues had caused users to abandon it and emigrate to Twitter.
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At the beginning of 2009, Google announced it was ceasing all development of Jaiku. The code was open sourced to the Google Apps Engine, with only Google volunteers left to support it. In spite of Jaiku’s potential, it seems Google did not put the necessary time and energy into maintaining and increasing its membership, causing it to fall by the wayside.
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So too did micro-blogging platform Pownce fail despite its immense promise. Pownce’s inception was followed by great intrigue and hype, thanks to the infamy of the developers Leah Culver, Daniel Burka and Digg creator Kevin Rose. It set itself apart by integrating file sharing into the system, allowing files up of to 100 MB to be sent by free users and 250 MB by pro users. It also had event invitations as a big feature, further enhancing the social aspect of the this medium. People were buying and selling invites to it on eBay and many believed it would be a runaway success.
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Not so, as when people finally did get to use Pownce, they found it was good but not exactly game changing. While these new features were useful, they were simply an evolution of an existing service and it wasn’t enough to make users switch from Twitter to Pownce. Six Apart, the company who created Movable Type blogware and the TypePad blog hosting service, bought Pownce in December 2008. However, the goal was to acquire the talent rather than the service and just two weeks later, it announced that it would be closing Pownce down.
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While both Jaiku and Pownce had great features that were an improvement on Twitter, ultimately, it was the lack of user interest that broke them. Without a decent level of support and innovative features, micro-bloggers will not make the big move to another social networking platform. By the looks of it, Twitter’s reign of the micro-blogging sector seems to be unshakable and it will take a truly groundbreaking system that allows for sustainable use to compete with the social giant.
