With a lot of focus on social media sites these days one of the biggest newcomers that is becoming more and more popular is Twitter. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twhirl or Facebook.
Twitter has gained popularity in the bloggersphere thanks to several high profile bloggers like Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo. Each of these bloggers has over 10,000 people following their updates on the site. Unfortunately for Twitter their new found popularity has not been without problems. The service regularly struggles, goes offline and features get disabled. The backend has not been able to scale as much as the company had liked. TechCrunch used to post about these weekly but got bored of keeping everyone up to date once the company decided to open a status page for the problems.
Recently a new service popped up which is now taking the focus of the blogosphere, Plurk. Plurk is funded, based in Ontario, Canada, and has a team of seven people working on it at the moment, so you could call it a small company right now.
Plurk takes the Twitter idea of short updates and builds on it with better visual elements (a neat timeline) and many more features. The service seems fast, smart and has a great UI. Whether it can scale well remains to be seen but recently there has been a lot more signing up for Plurk and it has handled the increase well.
The question remains is Plurk a Twitter killer? If it gets the same kind of attention that Twitter has then it certainly has the ability to. The company needs to build a good API and allow for external sites to grab the data and then it will be in a position to truly rival twitter. What do you guys think, do you prefer plurking or twittering?
View: Plurk View: Twitter
Last edited by andrew_f on 05 Jun 2008 - 18:03
http://www.plurk.com/user/cara
http://www.plurk.com/user/failquail
The only benefit is that Plurk is funded and therefore can scale the service as it grows. But there are no ads or anything, so I don't see how the investors are going to get any return on their money.
Whoops, must have missed that news. Doesn't seem to be helping though
The only thing with Twitter is you don't find value in it immediately. Give it a few months, start finding more and more people to follow, and you'll start finding the value that's there
With AIM/YIM/MSN support as well as ping.fm support, is a desktop client even needed anymore? As it is now, I post to everything via ping.fm via IM or email.
With AIM/YIM/MSN support as well as ping.fm support, is a desktop client even needed anymore? As it is now, I post to everything via ping.fm via IM or email.
I agree, the timeline on my plurk is already crowded enough, so that it's hard to read many plurks through that. It'll be better if they give an option to filter the plurks by users. Plus sms alerts a definite feature!! I love twitter's sms alerts.
I viewed this article after Neobond plurked it...
I succumbed to the Facebook phenomena. It was fun at first but all I get now is pointless pre-teen crap in my newsfeed. I guess there's lots of adults out there with nothing better to do than make up bumper stickers or quiz themselves all day long or comment on pictures of flowers.
*YAWN*
Since I am out all the time, it would be great!
Only slaves and servants need to available at all times.
Then there's the fact that anyone can view the log of your daily life. I wouldn't feel comfortable with that personally.
He won't, but his point is still valid.
.. You know what, I'm going to start my own website called scumbleblork, with blackjack, and hookers! In fact, forget the site and the blackjack. In fact, forget the whole thing!
haha i kinda like it by the way.
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lol
In short, I couldnt even sign up, got an error that said they are working on it.
Going to leave Pownce and Twitter just so I can stay on one site
Add me: http://www.plurk.com/user/jeayese
http://www.plurk.com/user/kpolice
http://twitter.com/kpolice
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