In 1947 the Haloid Company acquired the patents to Xerography. A few years later they launched their first product and changed the company name – both the company and the product were called Xerox. At the time Fortune magazine referred to it as the “the most successful product every marketed in America”.

Twttr (as it was called then) was first “launched” in 2006 by a now defunct company called Odeo. A year or so later the IP was spun off/out and the product and the company were both named Twitter. In early 2008, Fortune magazine referred to Twitter as “the hottest Web startup since … gosh, February at least.” – and that was when they didn’t really understand what Twitter was !

Xerox had a great deal of initial success and managed a listing on the NYSE.

If it were another time in history, Twitter too might have listed by now, but the company still has a suggested valuation of between $10B and $300M.

Xerox had incredibly strong brand recognition; so much so that a photocopier from any manufacturer was still referred to as a xerox machine and “xerox” actually became a verb.

Twitter had a head start here – the word was a verb, but pretty much any 140 character message is now days referred to as a tweet.

Xerox initially produced the only photocopiers on the market and then, when other companies launched competitive products, they still had a technology edge that enabled them to keep ahead of the market. When the competitors caught up to (and passed) Xerox in terms of features and technology, the company tried to compete on brand recognition. But their brand was so synonymous with photocopying it actually lost much of its strength – I used to work at Xerox and often had potential customers asking how much of a trade-in they could get on their old xerox machine – only to find out that it was actually made by Canon.

Twitter was the first micro-blogging platform to really capture significant market share, but other micro-blogging solutions, such as Yammer and Present.ly, have subsequently emerged. Federated, open-source solutions, such as those based on StatusNet (formerly called Laconi.ca) are now providing hosted and stand-alone options for those wanting a brandable, scalable and more reliable micro-blogging platform.

Twitter no longer has more features than it’s competitors and to-date it has not been able to provide the sort of service levels that paying customers will expect / demand. Just as Xerox did – Twitter may shortly be left to compete based on its brand recognition.

So how long was Xerox able to compete using brand recognition alone? Well it’s at least 50 years and counting (which I’d guess is about equal to 5-10 web years?) so the outlook isn’t immediately gloomy for Twitter – but by the time Twitter launched its service in 2007, Xerox was down to number 5 in total US photocopier sales and its total market share was only 9%.

These days I don’t need a Xerox to xerox something – and we don’t need Twitter to tweet something. Sure, I do most of my current tweets on Twitter, but I also tweet on Identi.ca and, as soon as Twhirl or Seesmic or TweetDeck support it,  i’ll tweet on msu.status.net too . I always use web, desktop or mobile clients to tweet, so once i’ve set up my account(s) on my client I don’t think much about which platform or protocol i’m using (as long as it is up!) – I just tweet and follow.

Sure, there is still some stuff that needs to be worked out to ensure complete interoperability between the different micro-blogging protocols, but that’s just a matter of time – and it’s much easier to resolve than trying to solve the reliability of any “walled-garden” solution.

All this too say, Twitter may be a player in the micro-blogging world of the future, but brand recognition alone will not be enough to stop it becoming the Xerox of Microblogging.

(Disclosure: MSU is an investor in StatusNet)