Microblog Battle - Twitter, Jaiku and Identi.ca
A Comparison of the Top Three Microblogging Platforms
Nov 16, 2009
At some point in 2007, the term microblog became rather common among web surfers engaging in different forms of social media. Instead of full-blown blogging sites such as Blogger and Wordpress, microblogging web sites like Twitter, Identi.ca and Jaiku become increasing popular.
Compressing what one wanted to tell the world into 140 characters or less was and still is one of the more preferred ways to communicate with others on the Internet.
Jaiku
In February of 2006, Jaiku was born - created by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen. The official launch of this microblogging platform was in July of that same year. Google purchased the entire platform in October of the following year.
From October of 2008 to October of 2009, Jaiku has dropped from over 80K unique visitors on a monthly basis to just over 31k. The drop in interest may be from the microblogging site not offering many of the same things its competitors do - easy searching for people with same interests for one. And from the looks of the Jaiku blog, new development has come to a grinding halt for many months.
Identi.ca
Originally based on Laconica (now StatusNet), an open source microblogging software, Identi.ca came on the microblogging scene shortly after the highly successful public release of Twitter. The owner and creator of StatusNet, Evan Prodromou, wanted to offer an open source alternative to the public and succeeded very well in this regard.
Over the course of the past year, unique visits to the StatusNet site Identi.ca have tripled from just over 43K unique visits to over 121K. The increased interest for this open source microblogging solution can be attributed to a recent $875,000 financing round allowing StatusNet to increase marketing and support for not only StatusNet but Identi.ca as well.
Twitter started as a side project back in March of 2006 and quickly caught on as the preferred microblogging platform available. Despite numerous "fail whales" and overall web site bog-downs, Twitter has had a success that cannot be compared to any of its peers.
From approximately 4 million unique visitors for the month of October, 2008 to over 23 million in October, 2009, Twitter has enjoyed phenomenal success and shows no signs of stopping any time soon.
Winner
The clear winner in the battle of the three more well-known microblogging services is Twitter. However, with the new funding helping to bolster support and marketing, Twitter may have a run for its popularity soon in the form of open source microblogger Identi.ca.
(Statistics courtesy of http://siteanalytics.compete.com)
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