BibleBoy's Blog

Monday, June 02, 2008

Plurk = Twitter Killer?

Well, I think we all know 2 things.... The first is how much many of us love Twitter.... The second is how much we also hate twitter. If there is a list of unstable start ups somewhere then Twitter would have to be in the top 5. The amount of crashes the service goes through is just mind boggling.... And once upon a time Twitter actually cared about the users enough to at least keep them up to date on what was going on. Now? Well, not so much. I mean, hey, Twitter has enough users so why should they care if they piss someone off? We were ok with the growing pains because we all really felt that Twitter (the company) was really a part of Twitter (the network). They've certainly lost touch of that and as a result I think most of us are fed up. Not only is Twitter alienated from the users but the service is getting progressively worse. If things weren't bad enough we had the TOS fiasco which confirmed the fact that Twitter doesn't really care about us. We all love the concept of Twitter but I think that majority of us have had enough.

A few months ago the internet brought us BrightKite which is an absolutely amazing tool and something that I absolutely love. Many people began calling this the "Twitter Killer" but I don't believe this is the case -- well, I at least hope not. BrightKite is incredible for local communication. It's an awesome way of connecting with people that are physically near you and a way of talking about things that are occuring where you are. All of your "notes" are placed on a page for the location that you are checked in at. The thing is that for this to be a twitter killer, it really needs to take the focus away from local and put it more on global and the problem with that is the more that starts to occur the less BrightKite is what it was intended to be. I love BrightKite. I use BrightKite. I want BrightKite to stay focused on what it does best -- and that's not global.

But who's this? Plurk? I just found out about this less than a few hours ago and I'm already blown away by the interface. It is really sleek and thought out. Plurk is certainly a global communications system that does what Twitter does -- except with A LOT of additional features. In just the hour that I have been playing with it I really am excited about it. Right now there isn't any SMS/Mobile compatibility, however, their FAQ asks "How do I use Plurk from my mobile phone?" and the answer is "Give us 6 weeks and we'll tell ya" .... I'm anticipating this very much!

So everyone, please add me at Plurk. You can add me at BrightKite as well..... oh, and I guess you can add me at Twitter too and keep up with what's going on with me there (provided the service is actually working).

Plurk - bblboy54
BrightKite - bblboy54
Twitter - bblboy54

Labels: brightkite, messaging, plurk, twitter, web 2.0