Has Twitter become the king of the Social Media jungle? What is the future of micro-blogging and is there a real threat against the Twitter kingdom? What can a new micro-blogging platform add to the so-far highly successful Twitter experience? And is Quub’s attempt to “meow” its way into the Social Media jungle going to end up in an utter failure?
As we all well know, every jungle has its king! Usually, the king of the jungle is the lion, and this is how it was for years and how I assume it will be for many years to come! If watching National Geographic, Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel has taught me one thing, it taught me that cats will never rule the jungle and accordingly, I think Quub will always be just a cub and whether we choose to use it or not, it will simply remain a little cat when compared to giant social media lions such as Twitter!
The idea behind Quub is very simple so why do I see it as a fragile cat, you might wonder? Well, I can think of many reasons dooming Quub to a sad yet definite failure if not end, here are a few:
- Research & Development: Quub aims to allow users to literally answer the question “What are you doing?” assuming that people really care to know about when their friends are eating, sleeping, reading and so on. The real question is: Have they really done their research about this? Did they gather enough responses before spending money to create a service that I honestly would not use and do not see such a large audience for?
- Features: Quub has added features that are unavailable in Twitter such as the public calendar yet do users really want that? Personally, I would not really like to use a completely public calendar even if my friends are the only ones able to see it.
- Virality: Quub is not an open platform like Twitter which in turn limits their search-engine appearance by having everything locked until you are accepted thus limiting the element of viral growth dramatically.
- Repetitiveness: “Quub helps you actually write your status updates”. This means that after a while of “Quubing” status updates may become both boring and monotonous!
- Uniqueness: Many platforms such as Ning, Plurk and identi.ca aim to apply the micro-blogging method in disseminating information, Quub should have a very “different” element in its features, a unique spark to be able to shine through the clutter. I don’t see much of a difference in Quub rather I see a solid weakness in its limitations!
- Server Problems/Site Unresponsiveness: Yes! Already! Many people who tried to access Quub were shocked to get the following message: “Error reading from remote server”!
- User Needs: Quub, in my opinion, is more personal and with our busy lifestyles and many of us being time-poor. Therefore, I don’t think it is even close to being as desirable as Twitter since it lacks the ability of mixing business with pleasure! As Victor Panlilio puts it: “Another Internet-based time sink, as if we needed yet more of them…”
Have you even heard of Quub? That is a question I would like for you to answer. And if you have, what do you think of it? Would you use it? Do you believe it stands a chance?
