"Microblogging...what will happen in this area of social media?"

Extremely hard to say with any confidence, but there are some ways of thinking about it that can help a little.

1) "Can Twitter survive? Can they hold the court all alone?"

Generally the prospects of any business are improved not made worse by reduced competition. They pick up some of the customers, they don't have to worry so much about the prices they charge to their own customers, and they may be able to save some costs because for example they don't have to add bells and whistles to keep up with the competition.

So in general it is easier to "hold court all alone" than face lots of capable competitors. So Twitter's chances of survival may have been improved by recent events, especially as they won't have to face the might of Google trying to muscle in on the act.

That of course doesn't mean Twitter *will* survive. Whether that happens depends on whether they can find a revenue model or not. If lots of people value the service, which they seem to do, then there's a good chance that they can find a way to turn some of that value into revenue. It's probably not a very expensive service to run per user - just small text msgs flying about! - so probably doesn't need a lot of revenue per user to be profitable.

This is why serious venture capitalists have happily put their money on the line without seeing a dime back yet.

They could do something as simple as offering people the option of either paying a dollar a month to stay on the system ad-free, or stay on for free and accept two or three targetted ads a month in their feeds.

Does this mean Twitter will definitely survive? The answer is still no!

Because Google just handed a micro-blogging platform to the open-source community. Maybe they can figure out a free open source model that will sink Twitter. Maybe a service running peer-to-peer with no centralised costs?

However, in this scenario micro-blogging survives, just without Twitter.

2) Did Twitter just lose a couple of competitors, or gain two?

As we just saw, Google has left the playing field. But now an open-source rival might take its place. You never know with open source, but it wouldn't be shock if it did.

And Pownce has sorta left the playing field. But actually they've just thrown in the towel trying to be an independent company and sold out to a bigger one. (Or for all I know they just fulfilled their game plan, the dream of starting a small company and flipping it to a bigger one.)

And instead of a small competitor that I suspect most people have never heard of, Twitter now has to compete with Six Apart. In fact Six Apart will probably be a fierce competitor. Their existing business is probably going downhill, so they need to find the big new thing, and they have the resources to push hard if they think micro-blogging will be their future.

Again, possibly bad news for Twitter, but not necessarily bad news for micro-blogging.

3) So all will be well with micro-blogging, even if not with Twitter?

They say: "Never make predictions, especially about the future." :)

If there is a product or service that people value highly, it is hard to imagine that it will go out of existence entirely. Of course it can be bigger or smaller, for example maybe 5m people will use it if it's free, but only 1m if they have to pay a dollar a month.

Also there is a scenario in which the growth of a market can be held up because there are competing standards, and no-one knows which way to jump. Like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD for example.

At the moment, most people haven't even heard that there is any other micro-blogging option than Twitter. If in six months time there are three big name competing options, that might actually slow uptake into the market as people can't decide which to join, or wait to see which one takes off.

Also with more competition and less certainty of being the winner, the players might decide they can't risk investing as much, further slowing the growth of the services.

On top all that there are, as Donald Rumsfeld would have it, "the unknown unknowns". Maybe Facebook will figure out a way to let their users do micro-blogging, and all indepdent micro-blogging services will die out?

So after all that can we conclude anything at all?

Well probably the following:

- Micro-blogging is not going to disappear
- We don't know how fast or slow it'll grow, or if maybe it will even shrink
- Twitter may not be the eventual winner
- But if I had to pick a winner, Twitter would still be the best bet, at least for the medium term, because it has such a huge lead in userbase, which counts for a lot in social networking.
Source(s):
http://www.mahalo.com/Jaiku
http://www.mahalo.com/Twitter
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twitter_may_have_business_model.php
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_giveth_and_it_taketh_away.php

But mostly, lots of experience thinking about business strategies

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