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Micro-blogging is a term described by Wikipedia as "a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user". Several startups have witnessed phenomenal growth with micro-blogging services, most notably Twitter. In addition, numerous social networks - including Facebook and Bebo - have integrated similar status update services. The space is hot and it's still heating up. So let's take a look at 10 of the key players.

Twitter

Twitter is the key player in space and the company name is used synonymously with micro-blogging. The free service allows users to post status updates via SMS, e-mail, or web browser. What's more, Twitter has an open platform allowing third party developers to build on top of it.

Pownce

Pownce recently launched a micro-blogging platform with added functionality. On top of messaging, users can quickly and easily share links, files, or events with any or all of his/her contacts. See our in-depth review of Pownce for more details.

Tumblr

Tumblr is a very clean, slick micro-blogging platform. Its focus is on simplicity and elegance. Similar to Pownce, users can share a variety of things, including text, photos, quotes, links, chats, or even videos.

Jaiku

Jaiku is considered by many to be Twitter's closest competitor. Most features and functions are similar. It will be interesting to see how the company plans to emerge from the shadow of its main rival.

MySay

MySay is what it says. Instead of text updates, users call MySay and say how they are doing today. Then, friends or family can listen via phone, e-mail, or the web.

Hictu

Hictu is a service for video microbloggers. A webcam and a mouse-click are all that is needed to create a videopost. This streamlined solution saves time and effort for traditional vloggers.

Moodmill

Moodmill is a way to express your mood or current state of being. A sliding scale facilitates this process, while a quick text update completes the personalized service.

Frazr

Frazr is also very similar to Twitter. The main difference is one of language. Frazr is focused primarily on the French and German markets.

IRateMyDay

IRateMyDay allows you the ability to (yes, you guessed it) rate your day on a scale of 'Worst' to 'Great'. Users can also provide a short text update to accompany the rating.

Emotionr

Emotionr is a way to gauge your happiness on a scale of 1-10 (decimals included). As the name touts, it is a way to express and share your emotions and feelings with those around you.

Conclusion

Micro-blogging isn't a short-term trend - it is here to stay. The evolution of blogging has spawned this new mini version of blogging and many are latching on. The simplicity and ability to post frequently are what attract most to the concept. We expect much faster adoption and mainstream penetration than blogging in general.

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Just yesterday some R/WW readers were bitterly complaining in our comments about Google Reader's lack of search. "I'm a loyal Google Reader user," remarked R/WW reader Stephen Glauser, "but if they don't hurry up and implement a search feature very soon, the first company who does will win my service."

Perhaps the Google Reader team noted those comments, because today they've announced that Google Reader has search. What's more, it allows search for keywords (a very useful feature) and if you subscribe to someone's shared items, it'll search across those as well. Note: I had to log out and then in again to see the new Search box in GReader.

Beta Bloglines also has search, however it is not an integrated search within the beta RSS Reader. Rather, when you search for something using the Beta Bloglines search box, you are taken to a new browser window in the old Bloglines.

Now to a feature that I've been complaining is missing from Beta Bloglines - a 'View All' option. Probably my main use case for an RSS Reader is to view a list of the latest items, just titles and arranged in date order. This is really a "power blogger" feature, so possibly not something a lot of Bloglines users are requesting. However Bloglines told me today that this feature is coming, although not till later in their beta cycle.

Probably due to all the work Google Reader has done over 2007, they are in the lead regarding features. Bloglines is playing catch-up, even if they still hold the lead in users.

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This week at the Office 2.0 event in San Francisco, ContactOffice, an 8-year-old provider of a virtual office software, launched a new version of their web office suite. Built using AJAX and the Google Web Toolkit, the latest iteration of their virtual office and groupware application includes tools for messaging, contact management, calendars, documents, bookmarks, faxes, SMS, notes, forums, and integrates with Skype for intra-team communication.

ContactOffice initially launched their suite of online groupware tools in 1999 and has been profitable since 2003, according to the company. They have 350,000 registered users, 70% of whom are using a paid version of the software. They feel that the new version of their application provides greater speed and usability. Having only used their latest version, that's hard for me to judge, but it did nonetheless feel very fast and intuitive.

"This new version provides our customers with a faster, more robust user experience. ContactOffice has been around for some time, and the past few years we have been more focused on adding features to the product and building a diverse customer base," said Patrick De Schutter, Founder & Managing Director of ContactOffice in a press release. "A new technological platform and design was a logical new step to take, and I'm incredibly pleased with the result."

ContactOffice is not a full fledged Microsoft Office replacement, like Zoho, though De Schutter did hint at that possibility in the future saying that the new framework would allow the company to begin adding new apps and features in order "to become a full-fledged online office suite where businesses are able to operate 100% online." Rather, ContactOffice in its current form is more of a groupware tool that lets businesses organize, communicate, and collaborate in an online space.

The application looks and feels like many desktop counterparts, with a multi-paned user interface that appears modeled after offline email and contact management programs. A top navigation provides important application buttons (such as to create a new document) and changes contextually with each application, while a left side pane offers access to any of the suite's applications and folder navigation trees.

ContactOffice's applications fall into two main categories:

• Communication
• Messages - A full featured email client.
• Forums - Threaded group messages.
• Contacts - A contact manger that allows contacts to be shared with other members of the organization.
• Information and Collaboration
• Documents - A searchable, virtual hard drive, organized by folders and shareable with groups.
• Calendars - A very nice calendar that supports email and SMS reminders, and allows events to be shared with other members of the organization.
• Bookmarks - A shareable web site bookmarking application.
• Notes - A quick note taking app. Notes can, you guessed it, be shared with other members of the organization.

Conclusion

Some of ContactOffice's apps feel a bit clumsy and awkwardly suited for sharing and collaboration with other members of your group. The Bookmarking application, for example, seems ill conceived when compared to leading social bookmarking apps like del.icio.us, and forces you to jump through hoops to control sharing options. ContactOffice might be better suited to try emulating the market leaders (but on more focused scale), rather than trying to force a bookmarking app into their set convention.

On the other hand, much of ContactOffice is very impressive. Their email suite, though perhaps not quite as polished, is as easy to use and as attractive visually as Yahoo!'s new Mail application, for example. And their calendar app is one of the nicest I have seen.

In all, ContactOffice is an interesting groupware play, that (mostly) neatly wraps up a number of communication and collaboration applications for use by groups. It will be interesting to see where they take their new platform and if their plans truly include a full fledged Microsoft Office replacement that can compete with Zoho, ThinkFree, gOffice, Google Apps, and others. The application suite has a full featured free version, and users can link their individual accounts and create groups without paying an additional fee.

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The first post in this two part series took a brief look at the challenge of managing our digital identities - what people see when they find us or our companies online.Way back in 1999, Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy famously said “You have zero privacy…Get over it.”But “getting over it” does not mean we have [...]

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This week on Read/WriteTalk I had the opportunity to talk to Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter. One of the more interesting topics in the podcast was the open platform that Twitter has developed. We also discussed how the team came up with the idea for Twitter, different catalysts over the past year for user growth, and even how they came up with the name. Click here to read a transcript or listen to the full interview.

One of the 10 Future Web Trends mentioned in Richard MacManus' post earlier today was 'Web Sites Becoming Web Services'. This theory was originally proposed on R/WW by Alex Iskold back in March. In his post Alex examined both Amazon and Delicious, as case studies of companies using open web services to create competitive advantages. He concluded: "The old perception is that closed data is a competitive advantage. The new reality is that open data is a competitive advantage."

Excerpt from Interview with Biz Stone

Similar to Alex's theory, I asked Biz how much he felt their open platform was a competitive advantage for Twitter. His response (emphasis mine):

"The API has been arguably the most important, or maybe even inarguably, the most important thing we??™ve done with Twitter. It has allowed us, first of all, to keep the service very simple and create a simple API so that developers can build on top of our infrastructure and come up with ideas that are way better than our ideas ...

So the API, which has easily 10 times more traffic than the website, has been really very important to us. We??™ve seen some amazing work built on top of it from tiny little mobile applications like an SMS timer that just allows you to set a reminder over SMS to call your mom or something like that, to more elaborate visual recreations of Twitter like twittervision.com, which shows an animated map of the world and what everyone??™s doing around the world with Twitter. ... The [Twitter] API has really been a big success for us, and it??™s something that we want to continue to focus our efforts on, looking forward."

Investors Appreciate the API Too

While Biz didn't comment on details of their business model during the interview, I scanned the blogs of Twitter's investors and it was obvious the Open APIs were compelling to them. For example, Fred Wilson explained during his post on the Twitter Investment:

"After Facebook, I think Twitter is the most interesting API that people are building to these days... The breadth of activity in the Twitter ecosystem is astounding. Open systems that support emergent behavior are way more likely to become platforms and we are excited by the possibilities of new consumer facing web platforms."

Another one of Twitter's investors, Dick Costello, (co-founder of FeedBurner, which Google acquired this year) seems to agree:

"Pay careful attention to the things that people do with your technology/service/product, because some of them may have discovered a powerful use for it that has completely evaded you. Note that this is another reason to strongly believe that services and products that are more open and adaptive will always prevail over solutions that are less open. Open solutions enable the ecosystem to discover the optimal value of the solution, whereas less open systems are at the mercy of their creator having guessed at the optimal solution in the first place."

Conclusion

As more and more companies continue to realize that open systems lead to a competitive advantage, it's clear that the future of the Web will include more and more open web services. A couple of the implications of this shift include:

• Picking up on a meme that was very popular last year, the emergence of business development 2.0. This can be summarized as partnerships being developed through product synergies, using publicly available APIs instead of months of meetings.
• As more and more companies drive traffic through their APIs, more creative business models will evolve to ensure that the companies offering the Open APIs are getting appropriately compensated. Currently the standard models appear to be limited to charging a fee or driving traffic back to the web service's site.

I'm sure there are many more implications and we'd love to read your thoughts on this in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, consider visiting Read/WriteTalk and subscribing in iTunes or via RSS.

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A few days ago I wrote here, enthusiastically, about the scheduled Blog Business Summit event scheduled for Chicago in September. And I was so enthusiastic, I wrote about it also on my Thinking Home Business blog.I concluded the post on this site with a mention of the fact that I had not so far been [...]

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Things move fast in the Web 2.0 world and those of us who want to keep up have to be open to changing our opinions quickly as the environment changes. Take Twitter, for instance.Regarding Twitter, in April I was poised as elegantly as I could manage, on the fence.Since then I have dallied with Twitter, [...]

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