Are you Twittering, Plurking or Jaiku-ing?
Micro-blogging seems to be the new trendy thing to do – everyone seems to be Twittering, Plurking or Jaiku-ing… and by everyone, I mean bloggers or people with a strong interest in digital which makes me think that these applications are not quite mainstream yet, and may well never be.
Twitter is currently the most popular micro-blogging application out there. The graphics look good, and you can easily customise your page. Saying that, the Twitter outages are no secret to anyone and the picture of the whale being carried across the sea by small birds when Twitter has reached maximum capacity says it all… and users are getting frustrated as a result. I also find it very difficult to keep up with conversations on Twitter… have you ever missed a Tweet from one of your followers because it got lost in the message timeline? I have!
Here comes Plurk, another micro-blogging application that has been getting a lot of attention in recent weeks. Plurk certainly has one thing going for it – a sense of humour albeit an odd one. I am not a Plurk user (yet) but recently followed a Plurk conversation – Plurk’s strength can be summed up in two words – streamlined conversations. And that’s what differentiates it from Twitter. Quite a few bloggers seem to prefer Plurk to Twitter and I will probably sign up in the near future.
Enter Jaiku, recently acquired by Google (wink wink to Biz Stone co-founder of Twitter, who used to work for Google). Upon signing up the first thing anyone will notice is the abundance of features Jaiku has over Twitter – most notably the ability to import rss feeds from various sources such as your blog, LastFM , Flickr , YouTube , and yes – even Twitter . The beauty of this is that outside of ‘micro-blogging’ your updates, the traffic you’re generating elsewhere on the web is presented in one neat package.
I’d be curious to know how you differentiate each of these apps? Does your community differ on each? Which one is your favourite?
Been using twitter, plurk and am a jaiku member but can’t be doing ALL at the same time. I like the time flow method of plurk but not everyone I want to talk to or hear from on twitter is plurking….. (sigh) and jaiku…. someone please tell me what i am supposed to do there again?
it’s a bit more than one can handle
Hi Stevie,
I only just recently joined Plurk so it’s a little too early for me to comment on this app. Same story ith Jaiku. I would suggest you stick with the one you find most user-friendly and the one where you feel you have the most interesting and engaging community.
Hope this helps!
So far I am keeping Plurk pretty clean. It allows for great conversation, but I don’t follow everyone who follows me … I don’t want the good stories to be lost in the babble
Hey Gavin,
I have decided to create a new community of followers with Plurk and will see what comes out of it! But yes, I agree that it’s much easier to follow conversations on Plurk rather than Twitter