It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

However, there are other countries where the Chinese language is used in microblogging. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong come to mind. But even taken all together they don't amount to the estimated 485 million Internet and mobile Web users in China.

Twitter has had some success with its Translation Center, with 200,000+ translators across all languages. It's hard to beat inherent scale, though.

The service currently hosts over 28 million blogs, which are used to publish tens of millions of posts each day. The site's total posts hit 10 billion earlier today, according to the company's "about" page.

Earlier this year, Tumblr even surpassed Wordpress in terms of pageviews and money, although it still has fewer total bloggers and visitors.

The New York-based startup has raised $40 million in funding since being founded in 2007. The service is estimated to receive about 3 billion pageviews per month.

Tumblr and similar services are sometimes termed light blogging, as they enable people to publish 'found' things very quickly and at the click of a button. Tumblr is the market leader amongst such tools, followed by Posterous, Soup.io, Noovo and others. Tumblr has grown the most in recent times, but Posterous has fought hard. Let's review the fast-moving and often entertaining moves in this market over 2010.

Tumblr has always been a step ahead, as it launched back in April 2007 whereas Posterous didn't launch until June 2008. In December last year, Tumblr announced a couple of innovations that kick-started 2010: real-time alerts and enabling Twitter clients to support Tumblr.

Posterous Gets Aggressive, Takes on Tumblr & Others

Tumblr may have gotten off to a better start in 2010, but Posterous soon upped the ante with new features.

In April, Posterous announced that it was shedding its minimalist origins and essentially began competing on feature set with Tumblr. When it launched, the only way to post a story to Posterous was by email. However in April 2010, Posterous added a full rich text editor and put more emphasis on sharing media files. It also hooked into Facebook's OpenGraph API and added 'like' buttons.

In June, Posterous embarked on an aggressive marketing push to get Tumblr's users to switch. It started promoting tools that enabled users to import their content from other products - including from Tumblr. The campaign infamously called out a number of blogging products as "dying platforms." It was a brazen move by Posterous and entertaining to watch, but ultimately it didn't succeed. In the final analysis, Tumblr grew the most in 2010.

The main factors in Tumblr's growth over 2010 have been its first mover advantage, celebrities and big media companies using Tumblr sites, and Tumblr's ability to socialize its service better than Posterous.

Traditional Media Companies Flock to Tumblr

A good example of big media flocking to these tools (but mostly Tumblr) in 2010 was National Public Radio (NPR). ReadWriteWeb's Chris Cameron spoke to NPR senior strategist Andy Carvin in September to find out how the organization was leveraging Tumblr.

"Part of what we do is experiment on different platforms, and it seemed apparent to us that there was a sizable number of NPR fans on Tumblr," Carvin told us. "It's less about page views and more about engaging a community that enjoys NPR."

Carvin explained that NPR is taking a very experimental approach to Tumblr in terms of curating content to share, engaging one-on-one with followers and determining how to voice the blog.

A number of traditional media outlets began to use Tumblr this year, including Newsweek, Life Magazine and Rolling Stone.

Finally, we should also mention that many full blogging platforms added Tumblr and Posterous-like functionality in 2010. For example, in September leading blog platform Wordpress.com added subscriptions - reminding our writer Mike Melanson of Tumblr's "Follow" feature.

Poll: Which Light Blogging Tool Do You Use?

Overall, it was a great year for Tumblr in terms of its user growth and uptake from traditional media companies. We commend Posterous too for its excellent features and brave marketing moves (many of the ReadWriteWeb team use Posterous - although personally I use one of the underdogs, Soup.io).

2010 was a year in which light blogging tools showed their worth as easy, fun ways for people to share content and connect with others.

We ran this poll in September 2009, but it's time for an update. Let us know which light blogging tool you use and, if you like, leave a comment explaining why.

The app makes it easy to connect via mobile to a StatusNet site, and it supports posting from an iPhone, sending attachments, as well as following public, profile and friends' timelines. Users can connect to accounts on multiple StatusNet sites from within the app.

Outages with Twitter earlier this year helped increase interest in alternatives. But the appeal of StatusNet isn't simply that it's an alternative to Twitter - it's that it offers an open source, distributed alternative. As former Twitter developer Alex Payne noted in a blog post just last month - the last thing he will ever write about Twitter - that's a path that Twitter expressly chose not to take.

But it's one that StatusNet has taken to great success, securing another round of funding earlier this summer in order to expand its enterprise offerings. StatusNet offers a hosted version. But one of the benefits of StatusNet is that organizations can also create their own private networks that function behind company firewalls, important as more people turn to social networking for communications, in addition to or perhaps even replacing email.

Today, National Public Radio (NPR) became the latest media group to join Tumblr, and I spoke with senior strategist Andy Carvin to find out how the organization plans to leverage the quickly growing platform.

"Part of what we do is experiment on different platforms, and it seemed apparent to us that there was a sizable number of NPR fans on Tumblr," he says. "It's less about pageviews and more about engaging a community that enjoys NPR."

Carvin says NPR is taking a very experimental approach to Tumblr in terms of curating content to share, engaging one-on-one with followers and determining how to voice the blog. He adds that he is eager to get feedback from fans, but that there is no "grand plan" for what they intend to accomplish.

Tumblr and the Media

By joining Tumblr, NPR also joins a growing list of traditional media outlets - including Newsweek, Life Magazine and Rolling Stone - attempting to reach fans on the popular service. But why is Tumblr such an attractive new medium for these organizations? Carvin says it's all in the visuals.

"Tumblr is a visual medium. Photos and snippets of quotes really stand out, while Facebook might have a sentence or two in a wall post and thumbnail with a link to a story," he says.

Why not use Posterous? "Who's to say we won't," Carvin says.

He believes Tumblr has attracted a media presence because of the ease at which a variety of media can be quickly presented on a site. It's this established media presence that led NPR to chose Tumblr over Posterous, at least for now.

"It's important to pick and choose your battles. It's easy to overextend yourself on every single platform rather than figure out sweet spots," he says. "We recognize that there's a large group of people online that love what we do [...] It's important for us to stay engaged with these folks at a personal level and not just a 50,000 foot level."

"A link converted by Twitter's link service is checked against a list of potentially dangerous sites. When there's a match, users can be warned before they continue."

"Eventually, this information will become an important quality signal for our Resonance algorithm--the way we determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting."

Users are free to continue to use their shortening services of choice but all links within Twitter will be wrapped in the t.co holster. Twitter says these links will be published wrapped on SMS but eventually online and on apps as either original links, as links with descriptive text or as page title, to further take away the uncertainty of clicking through them.

Not unrelated is the use of this system in contributing to the metrics of Twitter's Promoted Tweets platform and "provide an important quality signal for (their) Resonance algorithm," the algorithm they use to "determine if a Tweet is relevant and interesting to users."

Out of the box, the service will available to a few accounts, then to developers. This summer the company plans to roll it out service-wide. Given that all links in Twitter will be auto-shortened, it could have a tangible effect on start-ups that provide this service.

Despite having over 100 million registered users, it's still small beer compared to other services. Facebook, for instance, has over 400 million. What's surprising are the ways people, companies and organizations find to use the service. And who those folks are. Here are five Twitter accounts you might find surprising.

Federal Bureau of Investigation. Not too surprising that it's the Press Office that's Twittering. Fox Mulder might be off-putting to some, though possibly not as much as J. Edgar Hoover. At least these folks follow, although only a tenth as much as they are followed.

NASA. Lori Garver, deputy director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Twitters. And she does it right, mixing NASA news, issues of interest to space buffs and personal information. Well, mostly right. Honestly, Lori, there's no one worth following but for two other NASA Twitter accounts? NASA as an organization Twitters its brains out.

The Tower Bridge. Inanimate objects Twittering is non-hilarious. This account, for a busy draw bridge in olde Londone towne seems on the level. However, it makes up for the unexpectedness of the account by the sheer almost operatic boredom of its Tweets. To wit: "I am closing after the Maintenance lift has passed upstream." We can tell from the few accounts it's following that the bridge has a real telescope fetish, though. Unseemly.

Ivy Bean. Ivy has one unusual quality that makes her an unexpected Twitterer to most. She's 104. Yes, years old. Participation of the elderly in social media communications is not that unusual. The young and the old are less fearless than the middle aged in experimenting with different ways to communicate. But 104. Holy Toledo. Some have suggested Ivy's account was originally set up by journalists seeking "Digg bait." Who cares? Ivy rocks the keyboard a year after her "story" was first reported. I hope I'm 104 when I'm her age.

For more, check out ReadWriteWeb's Twitter coverage. Of course, there's always @rww.

So, although Blackberry sales have declined relative to iPhone and Android, Blackberry remains a force in mobile, and tonight, Blackberry users can now Twitter from their devices using a dedicated app.

• Tweet and reply notifications
• List builder
• Profile editing
• Change app appearance
• Strong caching
• Push notifications
• Short URLs
• Auto updating

"A blog post can automatically go to up to 50 social networks," said Loic Le Meur, CEO of Ping.fm's corporate overlords, Seesmic.

This new feature is a real-time feed effected by Superfeedr, a service that transforms a wide variety of feeds into normalized XMPP or Pubsubhubbub format.

Currently this feature, which is powered by Superfeedr, only carries a single feed but Le Meur said the company is working on expanding it to allow multiple feeds within a couple of weeks.

"We are testing with (just) one right now," he told us. "We will add several soon after we scale one. Ping.fm has 700,000 users so (are being) careful!"

Features? What Features?

Besides this, though, TXT.io offers almost no other features. The service, for example, doesn't allow you to add images to a post and developers won't find an API to add to their tools. What TXT.io does offer, however, are RSS feeds and a mobile version of the site.

TXT.io is an experiment in minimalism and won't appeal to everybody. Indeed, "elitist microblogging" is the service's tagline. Sometimes, though, simple tools like this are exactly what it takes to bring us back to the basics. Minimalist text editors like Ommwriter or WriteRoom, for example, are popular because they only focus on one thing and do it extremely well.

That's news to us. Everything these days is about Twitter, though. Go to a party--talk about Twitter. Have a blog? Talk about Twitter. Use Twitter? Talk about Twitter. Apparently we can add to that: facing legal pressure over allegedly anti-competitive business practices? Talk about Twitter. There's absolutely no more information available about this - but below are three possible scenarios we can imagine for Google integrating microblogging into its search product.

Real Time Search

The most logical integration of microblogging and search would be microblogging search. Google already indexes Twitter messages, in some ways better than Twitter does. We can imagine "real time" being an option just like web, news, images and blogs on Google search. Here at ReadWriteWeb we use this tool to have that experience already. There is a whole lot that can be done with something like Twitter search if the user accounts tweeting the twits and twats are taken into account. Check out the nascent awesomeness at Twazzup, for example.

This probably isn't going to happen, though, as long as Twitter is the only microblogging game in town. There just isn't a meaningful data set of publicly available status updates elsewhere. Facebook status messages would be great to search but that would contradict the fundamental nature of the site - and Microsoft has a lot of skin in the game there.

We're hoping that open source microblogging technology from Laconi.ca will spread throughout the land and give engines something other than Twitter to search.

Augmenting Pagerank

Inbound links are the primary way that Google determines what's a good page to serve up for any search query. Fresh links from the micro-blogo-o-sphere could well augment the traditional metric with some timeliness.

This is something we explored yesterday in a post about Twitter and how it is not going to index the pages you share links to. It's going to have 3rd party companies perform that function and maybe buy one or more of them.

We don't think Google is going to integrate microblogging in this way though. Why not? Because it would be silly. Google is already fast enough, good enough and doggone it - people like it.

What Are You Doing?

You know what's most likely? That Google will add the equivelant of "what are you doing?" to its search interface. Perhaps "what are you searching for?" Messages posted and available to read through that interface will be to and from your Google Contacts. (That's the people you Gmail with, basically.) Google is making a big push for people to take their Google Profiles more seriously and one consequence of that could be a well populated social graph for users.

Friends could help answer the questions you're asking of Google or they could let you know what they are doing, like a home town version of Google News. If you check out Google Friend Connect, imagining that integrated into search isn't hard at all.

Social search and status sharing. It's a lot less crazy than Google's search wiki.

The paradigm of status sharing and activity streams is just too compelling for Google to stay out of it. Maybe they will buy FriendFeed. Maybe they will build something themselves and maybe it will be good.

Schmidt's hint yesterday only makes sense, though. How can you imagine the integration of microblogging into search looking?

The Schmidt story was found in Brad Williamson's excellent FriendFeed group Media News and Analysis - thanks Brad!

In the absence of real interoperability between the different microblogging and messaging services, Twitter, which already has the most users, will only gain momentum. With Identi.ca and Laconi.ca, we do have real, open-source, standard-based alternatives to Twitter, but the sheer momentum behind Twitter will make it increasingly hard for newcomers to break through to a large enough audience.

In many ways, this is quite a shame, as most of the innovation around Twitter has come from third-party developers, while services like Rejaw, for example, tried out a lot of interesting features and user interfaces. Rejaw, for example, made 'real' real-time messaging a core feature of its platform.

Microblogging

With Motion's microblogging feature, blogs can create either a private or public microblog or both. A private microblog could be used for internal employee or team collaboration, for example, whereas a public microblog would let you share with your online community. Arising from the ashes of Pownce, the company acquired by Movable Type back in December, this feature has some resemblance to that service as it also includes richer microblogging features that the former Pownce competitor Twitter does. In fact, Motion's microblogging service is more like FriendFeed as it allows you to post links, images, audio, and video in addition to text.

Activity Streams

Also like FriendFeed, Motion includes an activity streams feature which they call "Action Streams." These streams are created by members collecting and sharing information from over 150 other sites supported by Six Apart's Action Streams service that launched in January 2009. The difference between Action Streams, which are implemented using a special blog plugin, and similar social networking services like FriendFeed or Plaxo is control. Site owners can selectively choose to show or hide individual actions in this decentralized framework. Also, Action Streams are published using Atom and the Microformat hAtom standard so they are not trapped in any one service.

Authentication Tools

Another aspect to Motion is its authentication tools which let users sign in with any existing account from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, or any OpenID provider. According to Movable Type, this opens up your community to over half a billion web users who can now comment or vote on your content without having to create a new account. However, members who wish to participate in the microblog as opposed to just the blog itself are still encouraged to register with the site. Movable Type believes this strikes a good balance between allowing for participation while also providing a compelling reason to register with an online community.

Profiles

Finally, Motion users are provided with online profiles which show their actions from around the web. Site members can follow each other and upload profile pictures just as they would on any other social network. As with the company's other blogging products like TypePad and Vox, members' profiles can also list their other accounts from around the web. These are imported by using Microformats to link to those sites.

Getting Started

If you're curious about what Motion looks like in action, you can check it out on BikeHugger (click on "Latest Activity" to see Action Streams) or visit the microblogging community on Real Estate Channel. You can also sign up for a demo for more information.

Current Movable Type Pro users can go here to download the plugin.

Features

'Moments,' as thisMoment calls your updates, appear in a side-scrolling slideshow at the bottom of the screen. They can include multiple photos and videos, which you can import from Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, and YouTube. You can also upload pictures and videos directly to thisMoment.

The central element for browsing thisMoment is the timeline, which consists of a series of bars at the top of the page. You can assign a specific importance to different 'moments', which is then represented by the height of the bar in your timeline. Different types of events also come with different colors. This is a surprisingly elegant way of browsing through individual timelines, but it also makes finding specific events relatively hard, has the timelines don't actually have dates on them.

As you would expect from a social site, you can follow other users, and send messages to your friends and family members on the service.

Geared Towards the Mainstream

ThisMoment is clearly geared towards a mainstream audience. It does have the ability to send updates to your Twitter account, but there are no embeddable widgets or other export functions for your photos or videos. For the most parts, thisMoment is a closed off silo. There is also no way to send images or videos to it from outside of the service. You can't email a picture to thisMoment, for example, and have it appear in your timeline.

Verdict: Pretty, Fun, But Limited

Most users won't mind (and may even appreciate) that the service lives in a walled garden. The site is definitely a great place for sharing updates about your kids or your travels, and thisMoment's user interface is very pretty, though sometimes to the detriment of its functionality. Why, for example, is the actual content relegated to the bottom half of the screen, even when browsing through the photos and videos of an event?

Advanced users will probably want more functionality than thisMoment currently offers. We would like to see RSS feeds from thisMoment, for example, so that we could broadcast our updates to FriendFeed or other services besides Twitter.

The service lets users send a message through one interface (SMS, IM, web publishing tools) and then automatically cross posts it to more than 30 other social networking sites. It's a way to broadcast your messages into more networks than you could otherwise participate in. Now with some very visible investment, the company should be able to scale and roll out even more features.

Ping.fm is just one of a number of companies trying to help users get their content out into multiple social networks automatically. They are all a little bit different. New entrant Tarpipe may offer the most sophisticated user controls and Pixelpipe stores high resolution copies of the photos and video it broadcasts in lower quality. There are a number of different services like this, but Ping.fm may be the most popular and now it's getting a big boost from Ito and Hoffman.

Reid Hoffman was one of a number of early PayPal execs who made out well when eBay bought their company in 2002. Now referred to as "the PayPal mafia," the group sticks together informally to invest in or work for their many small investments in new Web 2.0 companies. (See, for example, our news breaking coverage of another PayPal team member, Dave McClure, joining the high profile Founders Fund last week.) This group has been closely tied to the early days of YouTube, Facebook and Digg. For an excellent and engaging history of the connections between all these companies, see Sarah Lacy's new book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good.

Getting an investment from Hoffman could bode well for future, larger, fund raising efforts by Ping.fm. Hoffman is in touch with many of the hottest projects on the web - he's on the Board of Mozilla, Kiva.org, gaming company Zynga and a number of other companies.

Lacy calls Hoffman a "friend-tor," as opposed to an investor. He's among the group of young technologists who have experienced the good and bad about institutional investors and can relate to young technologists who need to be more cautious than most people were in the first web bubble. Plus LinkedIn is awesome, so we're sure Hoffman offers good advice.

Joi Ito has an equally impressive resume (see his Wikipedia profile, for example). He was an early stage investor in Flickr, Last.fm and many other very interesting companies.

Will these two investors make a big difference in helping Ping.fm in particular, and cross posting to multiple social networks, a standard part of life online? Only time will tell, but with the proliferation of niche social networks and the long tail of participation online across networks large and small - it makes sense. Consider the growth of mobile media publishing as well and there's all the more reason to get your content out of a single silo of Flickr, or Twitter. Hoffman and Ito have already bet on it.