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How often do you multi-task?
All the time, it's the only way I get things done. Sometimes, I try not to but sometimes I can't help it. Never, I just can't do more than one thing at a time.

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By: Tama Swan, Associate Editor
Issue: 2010jan

Competitive micro-blogging sites are taking the Twitter model and raising the ante.

If you’ve been bidding your time and waiting to see where the whole Twitter thing is going, the work laid out ahead of you is quickly growing. Companies hoping to get a piece of Twitter’s miraculous success are working overtime to develop niche versions of the popular social networking site, with the majority of these aimed at businesses. We’ve rounded up a list of these Twitter lookalikes and broken down their services so you can spend less time researching and more time answering the question, “What are you doing?”

Sprouter.com
The design interface and user functions of this site will make Twitter users feel right at home. It even sticks to the 140-character limit. Yet the Sprouter community is solely for entrepreneurs, so instead of querying users about what they are doing, it asks “What are you working on?” Its creators intend for the site to help small-business owners share resources and discuss common issues.

To further attract professional users, Sprouter takes the popular hash tag feature from Twitter and expands on it by allowing users to own a tag. (Imagine the power of owning the term “promotional products.” At press time it’s still up for grabs.) Sprouter also lets users publicize professional events that are in the works.

Yammer.com
This micro-blogging site is designed for interoffice use. It’s meant to help employees communicate with each other in real time and, as a result, be more productive. Yet unlike instant messaging sites, the conversations are fed into a central location for all to see and archived for later reference. Individual employees can have profile pages, so it serves as a company roster too.

The basic service is free, and once a company signs up its feeds are restricted to users with a valid company address.

Sokule.com
This site takes the Twitter interface and beefs it up a bit. It syndicates users’ tweets to a variety of social networking sites, including Twitter, that are chosen by the user, thereby extending your reach without lengthening your time commitment. And it gives users almost five times more communicating power by increasing the character limit to 500.

Rather than align itself with Twitter, Sokule is looking to create its own identity starting with its micro-blogging lexicon. On Sokule, tweets are called “squeeks” and followers are called “trackers.” The other big difference is Sokule will pay users a commission ranging from 30 to 50 percent if one of their trackers purchases a Sokule service upgrade.

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