Twitter for Entrepreneurs
Here’s another website that uses the Twitter model: it’s called Sprouter - just launched this week!
Check out their video tour.
I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I’m enjoying this neat little startup though. With Twitter, there is too much noise from too broad of a network. All I see when I log in to my Twitter account are short, barely-descriptive statuses written by bored people. Too often I see the extended version of these statuses on Facebook, so why even bother logging in at all? (More beef on Twitter later in my upcoming blog post)
I think Sprouter (and also Yammer) did exactly what Twitter needed to do, but didn’t: divide and conquer. There is a need for micro-blogging, but it is important for users to sift through the sea of statuses. Twitter could have done that by implementing filters to segment different interest groups, but they decided to invest in the unfamiliar realm of real-time search instead. This is great, but it requires active involvement – the act of ’searching’ – too bad people are lazy online!
In the near future, there will be more and more startups applying the micro-blogging concept (or Twitter model). And Twitter will be a dead bird – a martyr for micro-blogging – the Youtube comments of the internet.
You can follow me on Sprouter here: http://www.sprouter.com/peterkao
Peter Kao
