I found an interesting article on a PBS blog about the short message service blogs. Basically the writer focuses on Twitter and gives an overall outline.
I think he may have given short shrift to Jaiku, Twitter’s nearest competitor. It is a very cool service as well and actually is a close number two right now in my opinion, with potential to overtake based on how they develop.
I’ve used both services. Check out my pages on the sites:
pacificpelican.jaiku.com
twitter.com/pacificpelican
Since my text messaging on my phone doesn’t usually send out for whatever reason, I like being able to use Twitter for messaging–people that add you as a friend can receive your tweets over their cell phone. So lately I’ve had a lot of fun using Twitter to text message my girlfriend. Twitter also allows updating from a variety of online services like Netvibes and Facebook, and GoogleTalk or AOL IM. I have been using the Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in to cross-post all of my tweets (Twitter messages) on my front page as well as generating “new blog post” when I write a new Diary entry.
Both of these services have been prone to going down or having drops in service levels on either posting public timeline updates and feed updates or in receiving messages from one or more messaging systems. But overall the quality of service has been improving.

Both services allow customized photo backgrounds on user pages, 140 word updates and rss feeds. They both offer “badges,” which are widgets in JavaScript or Flash code that can be put on your Blogger or WordPress or or your Myspace page or wherever you can place code, even your Pageflakes homepage. Don’t make your URL links too long in your messages on Twitter and Jaiku, and don’t use any HTML tags–the former will become a “tinyurl.com” address, which will work but has limitations (like being replaced with a later link you send in another message) and the latter will just appear as ungainly code text on your Twitter page.
Jaiku is a more Euro-centered version, and they are second to Twitter right now I think but they seem to better understand the pure telecom angle in this–getting large numbers of people using either or both of these services could really drive text messaging revenue for telecoms. It’s not surprising that Jaiku is selling a specialized Nokia phone, the S60.
For keeping tabs on what people are saying on the services, you can watch Twittervision 3D and Jaikuvision among many others. Another service in a similar field that I have been using is Tumblr–it’s more of a short blog (“tumbleblog”) than online short message service, which can take a single link or photo as well as a short blog (showing how photos certainly have a place as well in this geo-tagging online mapping/short messages craze–as does the very fascinating Flickrvision)–here’s my page, which mainly uses feeds to track most or all of what I post online:
pacificpelican.tumblr.com
Could these and all the other new messaging platforms all manage carve out their own niche? Twitter is known as the “What are you doing” update service and has a techier feel (for example, reply is done in a “comment on this” blog kind of style on Jaiku whereas it is done by making the @-sign and then the username being responded to the initial word of the tweet) while Jaiku has a slightly better overall web 2.0 feel on the home page. I have no clear preference, but I guess I might start preferring one more than the other depending on who’s using them or which one is more convenient at the moment–for a while I really liked Jaiku, kind of thought I had done the “switch” to it, but lately the range of tools available with Twitter has pulled me back in that direction.

So what is next for the short messaging services? Well here’s one theory. Just as blogs used to be a way for one person to write simple, off the cuff messages to a handful of interested listeners and they have grown into the enormous multi-user data-base-driven CMS-included software packages of today like WordPress, B2evolution and Movable Type, the short message services will expand enormously as they look for ways to grow by incorporating a little feature here and a small one there. What would these changes look like? Well, how about more explicit group setups, allowing people to host their own Jiaku or Twitter powered page (maybe by allowing C-name record based site like Blogger.com and livejournal.com), messaging from more IM platforms (or any in Jaiku’s case), more depth to the home pages in terms of search, features and original content, tagging, and of course, at least one of them should open their source code, or maybe a really cool open source project could be built along those lines. Well, maybe I can get Qwittr out there as one of the attempts.