Nice piece in Wired on Twitter cloning which causes tiny blogs to bloom everywhere.

…the cloning of Twitter is largely an international phenomenon. There’s Nowa from Japan, Robiz from Poland, TexteIn from Germany and Noumba from France. Mambler, a clone from Germany, even has its own Twitter-style shorthand language.

The Twitter mindset is one that meshes easily with blogging’s youth
culture in regions of the world where SMS phone messaging is more
prevalent. Mambler creator Michael Baumann says SMS is widely used by
people under 30 in his native Germany, a main reason for the popularity
of Twitter-style services.