A New Twitter Rival On Anvil?

Ubermedia, which has made several apps for the Twitter platform, is said to be planning a competitor to the micro blogging website.

Twitter's new rival could attract users by exploiting complaints about Twitter, such as its restriction on the length of a message (140 characters) and how it can be confusing to newcomers, CNN reported citing people familiar with the plans.

Ubermedia has emerged as rival to Twitter after building a large portfolio of Twitter-related services through acquisitions. UberMedia has UberTwitter app for the BlackBerry platform, Twidroyd, for Android devices and UberCurrent for iPhones and iPads.

In February, Twitter suspended two of UberMedia's apps - UberTwitter and twitroyd -citing that they have violated Twitter's policies.

A recent data from Sysomos shows that 42 percent of tweets in Twitter were made by non-official apps such as UberSocial and Echofone, which are owned by Bill Gross' UberMedia.

More enthusiastic and power users are using non-official services such as TweetDeck, UberSocial and Seesmic as many of these applications have many more features than Twitter.com despite recent improvements, Sysomos said in a blog post.

Meanwhile, UberSocial is the third most-popular way to send tweets, behind Twitter's website and official iPhone app, Sysomos said.

In addition, developers were little bit annoyed over a recent Twitter memo that asked the developers to code software that presents data in a new and interesting way rather than the traditional list format seen on Twitter.com.

We want to empower our ecosystem partners to build valuable businesses around the information flowing through Twitter. At the same time, we aim to strike a balance between encouraging interesting development and protecting both Twitter's and users' rights. So, we've come up with a set of Developer Rules of the Road (Rules) that describe the policies and philosophy around what type of innovation is permitted with the content and information shared on Twitter, Twitter said in a blog post.

The Rules will evolve along with our ecosystem as developers continue to innovate and find new, creative ways to use the Twitter API, the blog post added.

Consequently, developers who felt they had helped Twitter grow were reportedly not too happy about the memo.

Till now, Twitter has triumphed over its rivals, including Google Buzz and FriendFeed, and is estimated to have more than 200 million active users. Last week, Twitter said users were posting 155 million tweets a day, up 282 percent from last year.

Nevertheless, a rival microblogging site from UberMedia may pose a serious threat to Twitter as its apps are already familiar to many users and could attract towards the new platform. Also, such a service may allow users to post messages on Twitter as well as on the new platform.

But, it may not be easy for Ubermedia to develop, establish a Twitter rival and has an uphill task on its hand.