Twitter’s New Competitors | Haters or Admirers?
Twitter , the 140 character social site is popular with a whopping worldwide estimated user base of around 140 million active monthly users with 400 million tweets daily according to CEO Dick Costolo, but two new startups launched late last month to seek and battle out Twitter at its own game. Twitter’s outage on June 21st could be one of the factors.
Moped a German startup founded by Schuyler Deerman claims that Twitter is not private as one can erroneously send a message to the wrong person. Moped is taking direct messaging, one of Twitters features, and turning it into a product. But surprisingly Moped has the same features as Twitter, portraying it as just a copycat than a serious competitor. Moped has Twitter’s @, similar profile handle and # tags and is even asking subscribers to reserve their Twitter usernames.
Moped takes so much from Twitter apart from its Chrome extension and Dropbox integration.
The site has a feature for users to tag others to enable them to read their messages instead of retweets and profile messages like Twitter. Moped too has no character limitation and a user can write as much or as brief as they want. The founder is also working group chats to allow as many people to exchange messages on the site.
Moped might not even injure Twitter, even with its recent funding and iOS app but yet another contender, also recently launched with noticeable publicity due to it’s being founded by a UK controversial politician may wrestle for few bored Twitter users.
Another friend or foe of Twitter is newly launched Menshn by U.K. politician Louise Mensch and a former Tony Blair aide, Luke Bozier. Menshn is a topical chat service which allows posting of 180 characters with links to photos, videos, websites and images. Menshn is set to hold discussions on trending predetermined issues at hand by allowing users to share what they feel about the topics. The site gives every new member 100 free followers. At the moment, allegedly rocked with security flaws which the founders quickly defended, the social network argues that Twitter was not a place to discuss relevant discussions like business.
Twitter in the meantime has a giant ad service expansion plans and is also hiring search experts and is as well expanding its tweets and introducing Twitter cards to even enable users to share videos, photos and become more interactive just as Facebook’s Newsfeeds are. Twitter therefore could be focused on taking on giant firms like Facebook and Google than looking at its contenders.
