sgBEAT – Singapore’s Twitter Clone

You know your site has made it when someone wants to clone it (actually, your site really has made it when Oprah talks about it). sgBEAT is Singapore’s bona fide Twitter clone.

sgBEAT has a range of features which makes it a hybrid service – a Twitter clone as well as a complement to Twitter.

One of the features that sgBEAT offers is the availability of updates to be sent to a member’s phone via SMS ( a service Twitter used to offer its Singapore users). If sgBEAT’s service gains traction, one would not be remiss to wonder how sgBEAT would scale and generate revenue to offset the costs of sending updates via SMS.

With more phones being able to connect to the Internet and mobile operators including data services in their plans, there is a faint suspicion that for Twitter users, it might not be necessary to use SMS to update Twitter.

I wonder whether opportunities for Singaporean startups lie more in building companies that complement the existing ecosystems created by companies like Twitter than building clones of them. The reason is simple – for a clone like sgBEAT, it is not adding any feature that makes it a unique and compelling service for the local market especially since Twitter is already so accessible and has gained traction with Singapore users. If, for example, the targeted primary users of sgBEAT are the Mandarin speaking population in Singapore and the service was implemented with localization features that would make sgBEAT more accessible than Twitter, then one might see a reason for such a clone.

What do you think? Does the Singapore market have room for such clones?

If you are looking for a lightweight service just to update Twitter via local SMS, take a look at the service offered by Twitter.sg.