As twitter started to gain traction lots of services popped up that were cloning it. The latest and one of the most successful was plurk but all of them don't really have a chance until they have the start traffic that would beat twitter in user-base amounts right upstart.
Why?
Twitter doesn't have a viral loop strong enough to grow by itself. It wasn't designed the way to fully exploit this. The dynamics of jaiku and pownce clearly show that too. However twitter grows... but why? The answer is really simple. Media loves twitter getting news out from it. If media loves you, they will write about you even if you are not newsworthy, but they definitely won't write about a smaller service as it won't be important to them. And as I already wrote twitters viral loop isn't strong enough to grow the service all by itself without the help of the media. So all microblogging services that appear that would attract less users then twitter from start are doomed as they won't get any press coverage.
Competition.
Well google actually thought it's a great idea to buy jaiku that's in fact is just a twitter clone and to be "clean" and launch a service they have stolen bought. However it can take years till they finally go out from their closed beta as it always happen with google's acquisitions, but it could also be earlier leaving twitter with less time to prepare for real competition. If google launches it inside it's gmail using the chat status messages twitter would be dead.
Stronger viral loop.
Earlier in this post i wrote that twitter doesn't have a viral loop that is strong enough to grow the service by itself. It's actually half true... If microblogging ever reaches the point where 20% of Internet users actually use it actively or passively a madness will start. When you have one friend using some service you won't join, if 5 of your friends tell you about it - you would.
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