Plurking

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!

Ground control, we have an emergency: Twitter is down

Twitter is down from today morning…Out of touch with the tweet world. All I see on my twitter home are the catbot, birds and the broken piece of electrical connection..On the plus side, saves a lot of my time. Twitter is a time waster, no matter how much you try not to think that way. The morning has been really productive in the absence of twitter. Why does twitter go down? Some of the reasons that the twitter folk have given us:

• Part of our caching service required an unscheduled restart
• This was a planned maintenance project
• finished a major infrastructure project tonight
• some caching issues—namely, the /home timeline cache wasn’t being updated correctly for everyone
• and many many more…

All of the above are from Twitter’s official blog..But the fact is easy to understands, the network infrastructure is too weak to support the kind of volume which twitter handles. I read somewhere that twitter’s staff are not enough to support the network, which could be true as I note and quote from one of their official blogs

“I just left the office, at 6am, with most of our engineering and technical operations team. That’s only a handful of people, but we were all there all night”

All said and done, I wish twitter would get its already upgraded infrastructure upgraded enough to handle the traffic or atleast give us prior information on scheduled outages and estimated downtimes (not that they have to be accurate). But, there is one thing which I read somewhere, “We need twitter more than it needs us.”

Awww…twitter is still down, ground control: “may”day…

Update June 25, 2008

Twitter now has whales instead of the bird and the broken robot. And here is a workaround which twitter has brought in to reduce load.

I cannot click on replies.

twitter is stressed out a little bit now..so replies is disabled.

Now, thats stress management at twitter. But, since we have the site status available on the twitter blog, I know that twitter is down. But, I would like twitter to do something about it, rather than telling me that the site is down…I  also note that now API requests have been limited to 20 per hour.

Twitter – the microblogging giant

I thought of writing this post when I started noticing that many of Twitter users were technological geeks whereas the tech challenged were satisfied with their myspace and facebook profiles. Twitter for me paved way to microblogging. Allows you to blog even when you are short of time, in short bursts of under 141 characters…

Updates could be posted to twitter through gtalk IM, mobile phone and many other tools such as twitterfox, twhirl etc..What exactly do people update on twitter..Just anything, anything you feel like..Its a way to rant into the web..to show your joy, to reveal yourself to the web..or simply just update a new website you have come across, your new blog post, the evening movie you are going to watch, any upcoming event you plan to visit…And all this is shared with your followers (friends)

I decide to write this blog for all those people whom I invited to twitter who wanted to know what twitter was all about…
Read the official twitter FAQ here