Technology. Without Error

Rejaw. At last a microblogging site which feels good…Well, now lets not start comparing with twitter..Considering that twitter has been around for long…but its always great to have comparison in the arena.

Microblogging has several contenders but none have even managed to shake twitter even a bit, except for maybe, plurk. Microblogging is the post of small messages, limited by character count which can be seen by the public(or maybe restricted to a group). Few of the contenders in the market other than the leader being twitter are Plurk, Identi.ca, Kwippy, Beemood etc.

Anyone who has used Twitter will find themselves familiar with the interface at Rejaw. The site is friendly, very minimalistic. No nonsense and has a smooth interface which I love. It is not that I am switching from twitter..but its good to have an alternative…Identi.ca was slow, sluggish and boring…Kwippy was good, nothing spectacular and I am already a fan of Plurk…

Join me on Rejaw!

I wanted to review Plurk when I started using it..but never got around to writing this post…Plurk basically took the idea of using status msgs/microblogging to the next level by a little bit of social networking features as well.

Plurk allows its users to update their current status using 140 characters (just like twitter does) But, their similarities end there..Plurk uses a concept of a visible timeline (all your posts are chronologically arranged on an animated timeline) This is in contrast with twitter’s way of presenting your (and your friends’) posts in a fashion similar to an RSS feed. A follower is someone who is informed of every update of yours and a friend is a follower whom you follow as well.

The most talked about feature of plurk is the karma feature which tracks the level of your interactivity and assigns a number to it. Higher karma allows you to unlock more smileys, more interface changes etc. Karma could very well encourage people to interact more, but would also make them very well spam to increase karma. Plurk is soon revamping its karma system..so that should be taken care of..

Another much appreciated feature is the ability to carry out entire conversations over an update. This allows users to interact more freely and responses are chronologically ordered and grouped with the original status message allowing users to follow a complete conversation from beginning to end. For the first few days I used plurk, I completely ignored twitter..but after the new shine washed away…I use it alongside twitter. Plurk unlike other web 2.0s does not share its API..However, there are many sites such as hellotxt, lifestream, ping.fm which already support integration with plurk.

Join me at Plurk!