Building a Better Twitter

A host of rival sites allow users to share short messages like Twitter, but offer unique features such as picture-sharing or private groups

By Douglas MacMillan

Fuzz Artists CEO Jeff Yasuda.

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In March, engineers at the music software startup Fuzz Artists began designing a tool that would help independent musicians distribute their songs virally, online. But in between coding sessions, Fuzz Artists Chief Executive Jeff Yasuda found developers frittering away their time on microblogging site Twitter. Then it clicked. "They said, 'That's it! Let's do Twitter for music,'" Yasuda says of the team.

Within months, Fuzz put together a site called Blip.fm that, like Twitter, lets users send short, 140-character blog postings to friends. But unlike its predecessor, Blip.fm also lets users append full, streaming songs to their posts. The result is a kind of online radio station where groups of friends with similar tastes in music can take turns selecting songs and attaching them to personal comments.

Yasuda is part of a vanguard of entrepreneurs spurred on by the success of Twitter, the pioneering microblogging service that boasts 3 million users and is signing up thousands more each day.

A Tie-In with Amazon.com

But Yasuda and peers want to create more than Twitter clones. From multimedia-friendly Pownce to enterprise-focused Yammer, these sites revolve around the sharing of short messages like Twitter, but tack on unique features like picture-sharing or private groups. They're intent on creating microblogging sites that are more full-featured, reliable, profitable—or all three.

Blip.fm generates a small fee each time the site refers a user to Amazon.com (AMZN) to purchase a song. In the future, the company hopes it can generate revenue through sales of T-shirts and concert tickets, as well as by helping labels or musicians market wares to specific audiences. Yasuda is in talks with all four major music labels—Warner Music (WMG), EMI, Sony Music Entertainment (SNE), and Universal Music Group—to stream their songs through Blip.fm, rather than stream from various other places on the Web, including Google's (GOOG) YouTube.

Many sites that have adopted the microblogging model, including picture-sharing site Zannel and video-sharing site Seesmic, see their features as a complement rather than a competitor to Twitter. Many Blip.fm users come through Twitter, and Blip users can choose to share their activity on Blip with their circle of followers on Twitter. "If anything, it's a great partnership for us," Yasuda says of Twitter.