Plurk: Delivering on the promise of Twitter

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I joined Plurk yesterday.

Twitter made a promise - stated or no - we expected it to be sort of like a mixed update channel where everyone could let everyone else know what was in their heads. It started out as a status update - I'm in Canberra, I'm in the business class lounge at LAX, I'm at work. Then it went to "I'm at work, my boss is an a**hole" and soon there was a conversation happening on bosses and other people at work.

The trouble with Twitter (apart from the system performance issues) was that it became too hard to hold a threaded conversation - too many other things happening in the world to break out into a separate topic without involving everyone, and someone getting in the way of it all by live-blogging a blow-by-blow report of an event somewhere and filling the whole screen.

Plurk solves this by displaying responses underneath the original plurk/post.  It isn't perfect (there have been some system teething problems too) but it is overall a better service for group conversation than Twitter.
A lot of the early adopters have been bloggers - several members of the Aussie Bloggers Forum have jumped in, and some have blogged about it. It seems to be a natural way to communicate about how everyone is going and what they are doing - with helpful commentary from their friends.

You can follow my plurkings here.

Posted by AndrewBoyd on June 08, 2008 | Permalink
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