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In may 2007 some 111 micro-blogging sites were reported internationally (10), making Twitter far from being alone, although the most popular. These are some of the prominent alternatives.
Jaiku is a social networking, micro-blogging and 'lifestreaming' service comparable to Twitter, founded in 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by Google in October 2007.
Jaiku consists of a website, a mobile website and a client application which acts as a replacement address book that runs on S60 phones. Jaiku is compatible with Nokia S60 platform mobile devices through its Jaiku Mobile client software. The software allows users to make posts through the software onto their Jaiku page. Jaiku have publicly released their API, allowing programmers to make their own third party software components such as Feedalizr.
Pownce was a free social networking and micro-blogging site, started by entrepreneurs Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, and Daniel Burka, and was centered around sharing messages, files, events and links with established friends. The site started operating in January 2008 but was acquired by blogging company Six Apart and shut down in December 2008.
Pownce was compared favourably to Twitter, and was also recommended for work settings because of its enhanced discussion-tracking capacity.
Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates, known as plurks, through short messages or links, which, like Twitter, can be up to 140 text characters in length. Updates are shown in chronological order on the user's home page on the plurk.com website. Users can respond to other users' updates from the website, by instant messaging or by text messaging from a mobile phone.
Plurk's interface shows updates in horizontal form through a scrollable timeline written in JavaScript and updated through AJAX. Users may use optional 'qualifiers', one-word verbs used to represent thoughts, such as "feels", "thinks", "loves", etc.). Plurk allows some features over Twitter such as greater management of contacts and easy sharing of media. It allows the use of emoticons and group conversations between friends
The Plurk.com developers have not yet publicly released an API.