It seems like UberMedia is entering a fight with the dragon and they are going to take on Twitter head-on in the microblogging space. Recently UberMedia has been acquired a lot of Twitter and microblogging applications, with the overall aim of creating their own microblogging platform. UberMedia now sends over 10 percent of Twitter’s daily activity. While both services have been co-operating to better both of their financial situations, UberMedia thinks it would make more sense to try vertically integrate a new microblogging platform into their already very popular services.
At the start of 2010, UberMedia was accused by Twitter of violating some of its terms of service and a results was suspended. Twitter was basically upset that UberMedia called one of their products UberTwitter, thus they changed the name of the product to UberSocial. However, ties between the companies havent geen on good terms since. Thus, UberMedia will be creating their own microblogging service and a Twitter competitor. It will be very interesting to see if the product gains anywhere near as much traction as Twitter.
Sina Corp. is preparing to spin out their microblogging service Weibo. Sources have told Chinese newspaper 21st Business Herald that according to some financial service institutions, Weibo has a bigger valuation than Sina’s traditional portal business, which is estimated at $2.5 billion.
Weibo already has over 100 million users and growing fast, with only 600 employees working on the service.
Gady Epstein from the Forbes Blog mentions:
An IPO would also have very practical business implications, namely giving Weibo a huge war chest to invest in the service, delay monetization to build its customer base and distance Weibo from its competitors, including the microblogs of Tencent and Sohu.
A new study of Twitter, more specifically the ‘Tweets’ on Twitter, found that 40% of all communication on the popular micro-blogging service is pointless gibberish, spam or people babbling about stuff only they would understand.
The company who conducted the study are called Pear Analytics and say that 40% of the posts on twitter are things such as ‘Only Eight Hours to go’ which would mean nothing to the average user – only a small inside circle would understand.
Another kind of tweet which make up the rest of this babble is SPAM; our beloved old nemesis.
You realise your followers has gone up by fifteen in a few days so your check them out. Then, your bubble is burst when you find that all they only followed you so you’d “check out their vids”. Hmm…perhaps not.
“We thought the news category would have more weight than dead last,” the report read, “since this seems to be contrary to Twitter’s new position of being the new source of news and events.”
Anyway, I wasn’t too surprised by this. Often, when I scan tweets on my Twitter homepage I ask myself “Now what in the world could that mean?”. But then, I’m guilty of it myself with some of my tweets reading like this; “No, I shouldn’t have done that. It was a baaaaad idea”. I suppose it’s good to have a number to put on all those useless tweets though.
4o%, remember that.
