A lot has happened in the microblogging space in the last twelve months, but Blogs Media, the company behind YouAre has maintained a steady as she goes, get it right development approach. The private beta is planned to last anywhere between “several weeks to several months” until such time the Blogs Media time thinks the site is right to launch.

So what does YouAre offer over the growing sea of competitors?

YouAre combines Twitter, Tumblr, Linkedin, Del.icio.us and the sites “secret ingredient” (their definition). At the basic level YouAre offers 140 character limited short messaging, complete with user profiles, support for @replies and DMs, and the ability to follow friends. The next layer of YouAre (and that’s the best word I can use to describe the feature sets) is Pownce and Tumblr like. Users can share video or pictures, although notably the site doesn’t offer hosting of either at this stage.

The next layer goes off into an unexpected tangent: LinkedIn style professional bios, including support for schools attended and work experience. Layer four takes us into what they describe as De.licio.us territory, but it’s part FriendFeed; yes, users can import external feeds into YouAre, although at this stage the choices are limited to De.licio.us, Flickr and YouTube.

But wait, there’s more! because YouAre also supports manual geolocation, so you can connect with others within your same area, based on the location based in your profile, or if you were visiting somewhere it’s as hard as placing /country/city after YouAre.com.

So what is it? Well it’s not a cake, or even an onion, despite the many layers. My very first impression is that unlike some of the other services I’ve reviewed lately, YouAre wins on name and aesthetics. It’s a great name, and Blogs Media has really thought about the looks of the site. It’s not OMG this is amazingly gorgeous great, but it’s pleasing to work in.

If I’m forced to label it as something, I (with some hesitation) would perhaps label it Twitter 2.0, or even a more professionally focused version of Twitter. It builds on the key concepts of Twitter, and adds to them in a way that isn’t overly complicated, or in a way that has a polarizing effect in an effort to be different (eg Plurk). Any user of Twitter will be able to sign up to YouAre and feel right at home. Although the various layers of the service sound complicated, in practice it feels like a safe, natural progression in this space.

As mentioned above, I don’t have a date as yet for when YouAre will open up nor do I have any invites yet(see below). There’s work to be done, but despite entering late into the space, here’s what I like about YouAre already: these guys are determined on launching this as a fully fledged, working platform:

Right now, our priorities are: launching a desktop widget for Windows and MAC, freeing the API, and optimizing the mobile interface, now that the site works on cell phones and smartphones without javascript support.

Yes, they won’t be launching until all the various parts of the service jigsaw puzzle are in place. In an age of half arsed product launches, isn’t it refreshing to see a company focused on launching a complete package.

Screenshots and YouAre’s spreadsheet below, and I’ll be following YouAre closely as it continues to be developed.

Update: we now have 25 invitations for Inquisitr readers. The first 25 people to email with this Subject: “The Inquisitr Invitations” get in. Also I forgot to add that coming in the next couple of days will be the ability to import contacts from external services, including Gmail and Twitter.

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3. Mahalo adds Twitter support to Answers service

The qualitative differences: Kwippy, according to the folks behind it, is “a micro/nanoblogging webapp + IM status logger + social network.” The main focus of Kwippy is based on links in to instant messaging platforms, with support for Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger. Like Twitter, the service consists of updates (called rather cleverly Kwip) and can be made from an IM platform, or can be fed back to it.

Kwippy does however lack a lot of features users have come to expect in microblogging platforms. There’s no character limit, but there’s no mobile version or support for @ (although you can reply to messages). There’s no audio, video or picture support such as with Utterz, nor is there any new about the layout, which is straight out of the Twitter play book.

Kwippy claims the service will scale because they’ve built in using Python, Django, Memcashed and Linux (note, their list), and yet I see the term MySQL and I automatically think database, content management, and perhaps some of the same problems Twitter is facing. Smart people keep telling me that treating services like this as content management platforms is the inherent problem before you even start, but I’ll leave that debate to others.

I avoid IM like the plague, and although I have a Google Talk account via proxy through a gmail address, I rarely touch it. I also don’t have an active Yahoo Messenger account, so the links in to these services delivers zero appeal to me. However IM is still immensely popular among younger internet users, and anything that hooks into these services is bound to at least have half a chance of finding an audience. I’m going to give it a shot for a while, mostly because Steve Hodson told me I should, and see how it goes. One day, one of these services is going to be the magic Twitter replacement/ killer, and I’ll keep on trying to find the one that is. The quest for the holy grail of microblogging continues.

You can follow me on Kwippy here, and I also have 25 invites in for those who want them. I need your email address though to send them, so if you can work out a way to give me your address, feel free to do so. Also everyone who gets in gets 25 invites, so there will be lots of sharing going on as well I’d think.

Related posts:

1. First look at new microblogging service YouAre: Twitter 2.0?
2. Zemanta adds four platforms, tweaks Reblog service
3. Pringo adds Microblogging to White Label Social Networking Mix