by Kid Mercury

StonyArc, a developer in the vBulletin community, has just released vBNow: a Twitter clone that plugs into vBulletin.

I've installed it here on KidMercuryBlog, just for testing purposes. Click here to check it out (sorry for the poor design -- just wanted to test out installation and usage ).

A few points:

1. It's not as good as Twitter. Twitter has a much better UI, with lots more AJAX. But, it does offer the basic Twitter functionality, and improving the UI should not be too much trouble; I would not be surprised to see another member of the vBulletin community modify StonyArc's contribution accordingly.

2. Simple technology that gains popularity is very quickly cloned in the open source world. NuHit has created a Digg-like voting system for the vBulletin community (it's installed in the KidMercuryBlog forum), and is selling it as a low-priced commercial add-on.

What's this mean for Twitter, and for other companies that create simple technology that quickly gains adoption?

I'm not 100% sure. One harsh reality that I think a lot of web service companies are not fully coming to terms with yet is that not everyone can be a consumer-facing destination, and it's only going to get tougher to play that game. Ultimately, I think to be a consumer-facing destination you need to have an open platform; Facebook is a step in that direction (although I ultimately view it as a cheat); Google Gadget Ventures is, in my opinion, a better step in that direction. Everyone else is going to have to find a way to reach their objectives by pursuing distributed strategies that plug into these open platforms.

Twitter, Jaiku, etc. -- ya'll need to plug into vBulletin.