Rafe Needleman asks to be saved from the Twitter clones
Every time I get invited to a new microblogging service, I cringe. Because once I try it (which, of course, I will; I can’t help myself) and develop even a small network of people on it, I can’t really leave. I don’t want to be rude to people I’ve started to communicate with. And then I get mad.
Kwippy, the latest Twitter-alike
The latest sites to earn my wrath: Kwippy, Identi.ca, and Plurk. There’s nothing inherently wrong with these services. They all have good features. Identi.ca is an open-source Twitter competitor; Kwippy integrates nicely with IM networks and has no character limit; Plurk has a neat timeline view and an addictive “karma” points system.
But, to my dismay, I have friends on each service (not so many on Kwippy, since it’s the newest), not to mention last year’s Twitter-alikes, Pownce and Jaiku. And there is just no way a person can participate in a half-dozen microblog services and do any of them justice, especially if he or she uses the services’ sites alone. We’ve been here before, with IM networks (and we’ve seen solutions, like Trillian and Meebo). For microblogs, there are emerging solutions for people who want to participate on multiple services. Here are the solutions, but after this list I’ll tell you why they don’t work: