YouAre: Yet Another Twitter Clone

I got an email informing me that YouAre — yet another Twitter clone — is opening its doors, and that I could get an account. I signed up, and candidly saw no reason to fool with the app. Just another knock off of Twitter.

Digging into the blog there, I discovered that the founders have coined a term for this class of tools: Dayflow.

[from Social Networks: The “Dayflow” Era Begins | YouAre Blog]

What is Dayflow?

Dayflow is a term coined by myself and Luis Rull which we use to define services with:

• Timeline plays an absolutely essential role on the homepage (Twitter, Friendfeed, YouAre and the new Facebook…). The latest updates are the most relevant and the newest things always are seen first.
• The power of just one click.

  All you need is a click to publish and mash together content. You don’t need to log in like on a blog or visit another URL to see the content you’ve published. Now all of your content and that of your contacts can be seen on one site only. This is the greatest innovation that microblogging and lifestreaming services have offered to date.
  
  

• Publishing and archiving of content differentiated by type: video, photos, text (Tumblr, Facebook, YouAre). You don’t always want to only publish messages in text form, sometimes you want to show another user a video and comment on it.

So why coin a new, meaningless term? What’s the ‘Day’ in ‘Dayflow’?

Flow applications (like lifestreaming apps, or Tumble blogs) are all derived from a real-time, post as it comes in, model. Depending on what the flow app is up to, different media types may be supported, or not. But that is less important that the emergent value of the app’s approach to filtering, annotation, and aggregation.

At any rate, we don’t need a term like Dayflow, and I predict it will die a fast death.

This reminds me of the empty use of ‘social graph’ which is a synonym for ‘social network’ and has added zip to the actual discussion of what is going on. Here’s another example of that.