Kwippy = Twitter + IM status logger + Social Network..but.…

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Kwippy is an interesting microblogging platform that marries Twitter-styled-microblogging with IM statuses.

Before you ask why another microblogging platform, here is the answer from Kwippy team:

On twitter you mostly meet strangers. By strangers I mean people you don’t know in the real world. It’s like barcamp, or a conference where you go partly to network. You meet fellow bloggers, marketeers, and people from your field. Yes friendships may grow among them, but mostly there are subtle motives behind the tweets. From promoting your blog, selling your product, showing your expertise, etc.

Pownce is geared more towards file sharing, sharing media (youtube, mp3s) etc. And it has an AIR instant messenger kind of software which makes it a little closer to an Instant Messenger.

In kwippy, the whole focus is on the Instant Messenger. The friends list on the instant messenger is the most intimate friends list you can find, of all social networks. It gives the people in the list immediate access to your attention. People share their joys, sorrows, their favorite links, and thousand other things through their status messages. And all these people also have a list of their closest friends on their list.

Essentially, Kwippy enables one to integrate their IM status updates with the product. So, apart from regular microblogging feature, it also catches your IM statuses and when’er you update IM status, it goes as a kwipp to all your followers (very tweet!).

I liked the idea and the implementation, but here are a few basic questions I have for the team:

• Why use Kwippy and not Twitter? Because of the IM status integration? So, tomorrow if Twitter adds that, the differentiation is gone.
• Personal/Intimate friends - Here is my take on any closed groups.
  Many of us may not have realized, but the world has opened up and here are few instances of that:
  • GTalk adds people as friends, the moment they email each other. Even though one can disable that, nobody actually does that (and haven’t seen anybody cribbing about this defaul behavior of GTalk.)
  • Twitter has built a platform for people to share their thoughts/emotions/rants in public. It’s popular because it’s public, because its a connector. Had it allowed creation of private groups, it won’t be as popular as what it is today.
  • FriendFeed does allow creation of private rooms – they are doing lot more than twitter (rather leeching on every possible social media app) and are playing a bigger game.

Essentially, what I am trying to say here is that the differentiation cited by Kwippy team needs to be well thought of – a feature cannot ever be a differentiator and building a similar interface as your nearest competitor just doesn’t work (lets learn from FriendFeed on this one).

What’s your take on Kwippy?

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