I'm fed up with Twitter, it keeps dumping Tweets and isn't responding to various Pipes or feeds I've tried to set up. Coupled with huge amounts of downtime, it's time to move over to Plurk. It's got a nice timeline system and something called Karma, which is points for posting, having friends and so on. I don't think I care much about Karma but the "I'm Doing This Feed" seems to work a treat. I've friended up Aggro too.
I'll be builidng my feed into the External Happenings box on the left. If you decide Plurk is good for you, then let me know your feed too. Twitter just won't allow Pipes to aggregate at the moment. I'll keep fiddling but my hopes are not up!
Dammit; you kept asking
Dammit; you kept asking about it, and I kept putting off a response until I had time to write a decent one. And now you've given up waiting and written more-or-less the response I would have. :)
Basically, I've found plurk to be more or less just like twitter, but without the reliability problems. The default UI is a little DHTML heavy, which I like, but might turn some people off. You can always use http://www.plurk.com/m/ which is the mobile interface, but works fine on a normal browser and is pretty similar to twitter's interface.
The karma system is a nice idea - it stops people doing annoying things like sending spurious friend requests, or spamming the system, but on the other hand, I don't really like having to earn the ability to customise my UI.
One thing I really do like is the fine-grained control you have over who sees what updates (plurks). You can set up groups of friends (called cliques,) and each plurk can be set to world-readable, friends only, or a specific friend or clique.
The big downside is arguably also it's big strength; there aren't many users. Twtter's big benefit is it's ubiquity, and a lot of my friends (and not a few celebs) use it. So as much as I like using plurk for my own micro-blogging needs, I still find I need to go back to twitter to keep up with other people.
After a day of Plurking, I
After a day of Plurking, I must say that I approve of it wholeheartedly. The DHTMLness is lovely and I am liking the timeline. I think it will come into its own when there are more of us working on it.
I had a look last night, and
I had a look last night, and it just seems overly complex for what it is. I initially signed up to Twitter to give me something to fill a space on my website, do you really need something so overtly complex as the plurk UI?
You could potentially build something that updates both at once, however I can't see any Plurk API's for updating as Twitter has. I suspect that if there is then there will be an app/website that updates both/all at once.
ping.fm will update pretty
ping.fm will update pretty much everything in the world, including plurk and twitter.
Why you'd want to is a different question. I have friends who massively cross post their updates, and it just ends up repeatedly spamming me with the same information through multiple content channels. It just annoys me, and leads to me dropping them from my 'follows' list.
So, er I guess you'd want to if annoying me is a priority in your life. :)
You could probably turn that
You could probably turn that on its head and ask why you (or them for that matter) subscribe to multiple platforms?
Once you are using a service, there is some obligation to keep it updated...unless you have different things to say on different channels (and using Plurk/Twitter as an example I can't see why you would...they both serve identical purposes) the end result is duplicate posts to separate systems. Those people who only use 1 of them don't notice, those people also subscribed to multiple platforms get everything in triplicate!
There is a reason that services like ping.fm and hellotxt.com exist...people run multiple services, and feel obliged to update them all. The loser is of course the friend who subscribes to all those services...
That said, I've removed people from Facebook for basically being fucktards. One lad in particular seeme dto be going for some record for installing apps to his page, and they all have the really irritating consequence of messaging all friends all the time about some pointless thing he has done. When I blocked him he had over 200 apps...pillock!
Well, I don't personally use
Well, I don't personally use that many platforms (one blog, facebook more as a contact list than anything else and one microblogging service.) I have a pretty clear idea what sort of content goes on each platform, and don't crosspost.
Maybe my problem is that I assume other people will compartmentalise just as much, but I like to make sure I subscribe to my all friend's feeds, so I get all of their updates. When you then get someone who twitters all day, has them aggregated into a daily blog post, and has facebook set up to use their most recent tweet as their status, it gets a bit irritating.
Ooooh, Twitter is back on
Ooooh, Twitter is back on the feed service.
To be honest, Pete. I only access you through 2 services. Lack-of and ijy.cc. If it doesn't come through on of those, I don't look at it.
Every update I do is fed
Every update I do is fed through to ijy.cc ... thats really the point of the page these days. I need to fine-tune it, and fiddle with the layout, but the concept is there. I also throw a lot of it onto my Homepage here. I'd feed it through as a blog to here, but I don't think it accepts feeds in as blog posts on Drupal.
I think the Pipes/Twitter issue is that Twitter have locked external apps to 250 updates an hour, and I think that it sees all Pipes accesses as a single app, so its only allowing 250 Pipes to be updated every hour. Sometimes you are one of those, sometimes you aren't.
For the redesign of Lack-Of
For the redesign of Lack-Of (we'll go Version 6), the front page will probably be a four column layout. The teaser in the blog list on the front page isn't very long and we can shorten it. To read any given story, most people click a link anyway.
Actually, I'm finding that
Actually, I'm finding that Plurk is so much more than Twitter. It's not just about the 140 words, there is more community involved there. You can respond in a more meaningful way to people's Plurks and you don't end up with lots of @..... to people you don't know. Conversations are threaded in a much more meningful way.
That probably why I don't
That probably why I don't rate it then... I hardly ever use the "community" features of Twitter. I've just done a quick count, and I've done 5 directed messages in total. Conversations tend to get moved over to email/forums, which is a much better location for them.
Ah, but do you not do
Ah, but do you not do directed posts because Twitter isn't suited for it? Surely you don't want to start a convo thread on a forum for everything?
I don't do directed posts as
I don't do directed posts as I don't see the point in it. Twitter/Plurk is basically a glorified Facebook status update. If I'm that bothered/interested about what someone has said I'm send them an email. I don't really want conversations happening on 20 different media at once, and email is pretty much universal, unlike the various me-to's jumping around at the moment.
If the conversation would include multiple people, I'll use a forum if applicable to those people, otherwise it will be an email again...
Ah, but that's where you're
Ah, but that's where you're wrong. Plurk isn't a glorified status update. You might be using it that way but it's actually a lot more. You can have micro-conversations on Plurk. Little bits of comedy or messing around. You can get tiny threads of bitching that you really can't do with email. You can do it with a forum but it builds into the status beautifully. It's like saying a car is a glorified bike... yes but at the same time, it's a different tool altogether. The micro-convos you get on Plurk would just not occur anywhere else.
It is a pain to have 10 different media for communicating online but I only use three: Lack-Of, Plurk and Gmail. GMail works on an interrupt basis, Lack-Of I check on a regular basis and Plurk I do now and again. As only the Plurk root conversations pop up on Lack-Of, I don't need to check Plurk very often.
As for Twitter, I am fed up with the outages, dropping of twits I send from Safari on the iPod, difficulties with the RSS and the fact that it grinds to a halt whenever there is a big event online, such as the releasing of something by Apple. It's just not reliable, it never has been and I can't see it ever being so. I also don't want to see other people's conversations in the main feed all the time. You might no do it but I see it a lot on Twitter and it's tiresome when you have the 400th "@Blahblah yeah, coming over on Tuesday". I DON'T CARE.
Everyone has their preferences, so I can't really argue, I just think you're missing out.
Regarding the Plurk/Twitter
Regarding the Plurk/Twitter outages, did you know that Plurk had more downtime than Twitter in July?
Growing pains hits everyone...
That's a actually a bit of a
That's a actually a bit of a misleading statistic. Plurk's downtime was almost all planned. It overran heavily on one occasion, true, but it was still at a time chosen because of light usage, and we'd been warned it was comming. They also apologised profusely and gave everyone karma to make up for it. That's a totally different animal to twitter's random "no, I'm not going to let you access the site now for no obvious reason" outages.
It's true that everyone has growing pains though, especially as they get more popular. Really, twitter's only failing is to be more popular than any sanely affordable infrastructure could support. I've said before (and will, doubtless, say again) my big hope with Plurk is that it doesn't have the sort of popularity explosion that twitter did, because if it does it'll have all the same problems. Or worse.
However, a social service
However, a social service like Twitter/Plurk is only useful _if_ it is popular.
The downtime thing...its still unplanned, and its a possible sign of cracks in the seams (7 hours of un-interrupted downtime is a _long_time). I imagine Twitters problems with uptime began much the same way. Twitter seem to be coming out of the other side somewhat now...still some issues, however since the data centre migration a couple of months ago its much better (Pipes bizarreness aside). I still reckon that at some point one of the big players is going to buy them out...
That Karma thing sounds daft...
It's true, it was unplanned,
It's true, it was unplanned, and it's true that it's a big deal. But an overrun on planned downtime suggests a botched upgrade to me, rather than hardware that just can't take the daily strain. Especially since at all other times the service is rock solid.
Twitter may be better now, but it's still not what I'd call good enough. Having been using both for... whatever it is now, a month? a couple of weeks? I still subjectively feel that twitter is slower and less likely to be available. I don't have any data to back it up, but I've never tried to browse to plurk and got their equivalent of the too-many-tweets whale. It happens every couple of days on twitter.
As for popularity. Meh. Like you, I don't primarily use it as a social service. I use it to populate a sidebar on my blog with day-to-day stuff that doesn't warrant a full blog post. I switched to plurk when twitter's unreliability made that annoyingly difficult. The fact that I get comedy conversations going with brainwipe and hexy now is a bonus. If it never gets any more popular than that, it's still a win for me. Obviously, I'd like to have more of my friends on there, but I can live without millions of American teenagers tweeting about their homework.
(and karma is daft)