I got invited to YATKO (yet another Twitter knock off) called Kwippy:
[from Kwippy blog › kwippy !!]What is kwippy? - a micro/nanoblogging webapp IM status logger social network
Why another microblogging app when there are already plenty out there? - There is twitter, pownce, jaiku, and 10 other similar ones. Though all of these promote small posts, each has a different kind of social network.
On twitter you mostly meet strangers. By strangers I mean people you don’t know in the real world. It’s like barcamp, or a conference where you go partly to network. You meet fellow bloggers, marketeers, and people from your field. Yes friendships may grow among them, but mostly there are subtle motives behind the tweets. From promoting your blog, selling your product, showing your expertise, etc.
Pownce is geared more towards file sharing, sharing media (youtube, mp3s) etc. And it has an AIR instant messenger kind of software which makes it a little closer to an Instant Messenger.
In kwippy, the whole focus is on the Instant Messenger. The friends list on the instant messenger is the most intimate friends list you can find, of all social networks. It gives the people in the list immediate access to your attention. People share their joys (i got a raise), sorrows (i flunked my english papers), their favorite links, and thousand other things through their status messages. And all these people also have a list of their closest friends on their list. And like in the real world when a real friend introduces you to another person, the chances that you hit it off are greater. There’s this trust thing which is automatic.
I would argue that yes, a few years ago, before the advent of Facebook and Twitter, the instant messaging buddylist was the center of people's universes. (That's why I wanted to build Nerdvana on top of AOL's AIM, for example.) Today, however, the fragmenting of our social identity is proceeding at a tremendous pace, and candldly, the central role of the IM buddylist has shifted to a secondary or even tertiary place. And most of the folks on my buddylist have already migrated to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
But it is still conceivable that the latent energy embedded in the buddylist in Gmail -- which is actually the union of those that you email and those that you IM -- could actually be tapped by a Twitteresque microblogging tool. Kwippy's polling of my Gtalk status on some cycle does not really tap that power, although it's a cute feature.
However, I think the answer is not going to be Kwippy, but something altogether different: a new take on scaled communication, ranging from haptic ('Good morning, Edglings!'), to locational ('Reston VA'), to informational ('@stoweboyd Cool! Web thinker Stowe Boyd on the Tampa intern's post, "The Church Of Journalism Is Dying" http://is.gd/MlG'), to open unlimited discourse (insert some example longer than 140 characters that looks like an email or blog post). A well-thought through integration of Twitter and Gmail/Gtalk could fit the bill, but Kwippy ain't it. Maybe I need to dust off those Nerdvana designs, again...
Yep, Kwippy tries very hard butfails to differentiate itself from just any other Twitter clone. In fact, to me, it's exactly backwards. I mean, I already use Adium (Windows users try Pidgin.im) to update all my IM statuses at once, and Ping.fm to send out microblogs to all my services. Kwippy only makes me annoyed.
Posted by: Eli Juicy Jones | August 01, 2008 at 08:24 AM