Twitter is most popular and most used mirco blogging or socila networking service we can find but there must be the Twitter Alternatives. Blogging began as a very personal exercise. People like you and I would make frequent journal entries and put them online for the world to see. Then we started linking to each other’s home pages, forming a network. These were the twilight day of Blogging. Twitter was similarly birthed just like blogging; it has blossomed early in its age. The reason why Twitter has become so big today is pretty obvious: people don’t have the time or the patience to post long detailed entries with regularity on their blogs or to sustain this kind of content for a long period of time. Visitors to these blogs, similarly, don’t have the patience to read what’s written. The solution was to shorten the size of the blog and have them updated more frequently every day or every few hours, an exercise termed micro-blogging.

Micro-blogging is fun and useful but our question is – is Twitter the only one? Of course not, like any other good idea, there are Twitter alternatives. Many have offered their own micro-blogging services. Here, we take a look at some of these services you are sure to find one that will tempt you to leave Twitter behind, even if for a while.

Twitter Alternatives: Plurk

Plurk was launched in mid 2008 and is considered by many to be one of twitter’s biggest competitors. Plurk’s distinctive, colorful profile page is easy to identify. Plurk’s interface shows a time line of all the posts that a user makes. Like tweets in twitter, the posts in Plurk have been called “Plurks”. The user interface is more colorful and user friendly. The user has a lot more features to play around with. The timeline interface means you can use the mouse and slice the timeline around or use the scroll to any period in order to read posts. It’s simpler than having to going back a page at a time, like on most other services. Plurk has a rating system called karma. The service gives the user more karma points if he or she updates the profile information or post often on Plurk. The perks are increase in karma points and also access to more emoticons through the service. Karma points can also be lost if you don’t post, or if you spam users. This is a good way to prevent spamming of messages and at the same time encourage an active community.

Post can be made using can be made using a moos or an action, instead of just plain text message. Plurk even lets you choose which group of users can read your posts. Like Twitter, Plurkto a has support for posting from mobile phones so that you can post while you aren’t on your PC. There’s even the integration for Twitter, so your posts on Plurk are posted on Twitter simultaneously.

Everything you do in plurk is interactive. This what makes it so great and also unnecessarily complex. Twitter is great for simple text message but if you want add lots content, have lots of toys to play with, Plurk will definitely interest you.

Twitter Alternatives: Ping.fm

So we’re looking at alternatives to Twitter. What if you want to use Twitter and all the other blogging services at the same time? Ping.fm might be the one, for you. It’s a slightly different kind of micro blogging service. It acts as a junction through which to post updates to other social networking sites using its interface. Almost every social networking has current status field. Ping.fm can connect to all of them and update the simultaneously.

If you have account on several micro-blogging sites and you want to post on each one of them, simply get a ping.fm account and link it to all the services. You won’t have to visit any other site again.

Twitter Alternatives: Tumblr

Tumblr offers an impressive interface as well; but it’s not as flashy as Plurk. There is a main dashboard, which displays all the options to the user to post a photo, text, chat, audio, video, and so on. Tumblr has taken the components of micro-blogging services and have added on all the functionalities that you would expect from a complete blog service, on to it. Tumblr includes a schedule function which you can use to set a day when the post should be published on your blog. Another impressive feature of tumblr is the ability to dial US number and posting an audio blog post using a phone call.

Tumblris a great service for you if posting image is what you want to do. For those who want to post plain text messages, Tumblr is overkill. It even displays a list of popular bloggers under different categories. Tumblr has a huge collection of customized themes. It gives the user a sub-domain as well so others can easily acess their profile.

Twitter Alternatives: Video Micro Blogging (Seesmic)

There are those who think that text blogging is old and voice chat is the way to go. It is, after all, a more natural way of communicating with others. Seesmic is a service that works like any other micro-blogging service; except on seismic, people communicate by posting video clips. Seismic user web cams and micro phones to record posts. Pre-recorded videos can also be uploaded to the service. A 500 MB limit is set: a video can be either in the MP4 of FLV format. These videos are allowed, replies can be sent in the same manner in the form of videos. They are displayed as small videos that are viewed by the inbuilt flash player on each page. Clicking on the enlarge icon opens a larger version of a video. Users can follow others in the same way as they would with a text base micro-blogging service. Videos can also be sent to other seesmic user as well. Seesmicis at an alpha stage and the offering in interesting and different. It’s definitely worth trying out; even through the presentation might not impress many, it isn’t as pretty as some of the other web 2.0 startups around.

Twitter Alternatives: Jaiku

Jaiku is a micro-blogging service owned by Google science 2007. Jaiku is almost as simple and identical to Twitter. If at all, it’s a slightly prettier looking interface than Twitter’s. The features are also almost identical. There are channels for users to access and have a discussion. Replies to posts made by other are done in the same page itself rather than posting through your profile page in a forum-styled text area.

Jaiku has badges that can be embedded into personal WebPages or sites. Customizing the profile page is also available for all users. A background color can be selected an also the background image. Similar to Ping.fm, updates can be sent to the services through chat bots via instant messengers. Messages can be sent and updates received through a mobile phone another very similar service in identi.com. It’s free and open micro-blogging service that run on backend software called Laconica.

Conclusion:

Choosing a micro-blogging service is like choosing an instant messenger service you’ll always want to have as many friends as possible on single networks. Twitter seems to be doing well at that other services have to try to attract users to them. With each service trying to setup a bridge between others, it’s possible to post on one service and automatically have it replicated on others. Ping.fm lets you just this. The solution you pick them depends on what you want out of such a service – there are options plenty, you just need to make a choice and get (micro) blogging!