Twitter and The Like
June 2, 2008 § Leave a comment
There was lots of interesting chatter going on last night over Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed about a new Twitter competitor called Plurk. Haven’t tried it myself, but I was following a bit of the chat into to the wee hours (yes, I stayed up too late again).
What I have found through experimentation and following these tweets and conversations is that Twitter and FriendFeed work great in combination, that you can have more robust conversations via FriendFeed, and that Twhirl adds some really nice functionality to both Twitter and FriendFeed. I know now that I haven’t been using FriendFeed to its fullest potential. I haven’t been using tools like FriendFeed for their intended purpose: social networking. Duh! Again, its one of those tools that becomes more useful when you connect with more people.
I also learned that there are a number of companies out there that look like they’re going to give Twitter a run for their money. Twitterers are complaining that Twitter crashes all the time, and sometimes eats the tweets that they are putting out there. So you visit a site like When Twitter is Down to give you some advice about what to do: “Cry like a tiny little baby.”
Companies that are on the horizon: Plurk, ZobZee, and possibly Jaiku. There are probably others, but these are the ones I know about. Seems that people were going in droves over the Plurk last night, so much so that the system went down. Ha! One critic said aptly something like “if you’re going to position yourself as a competitor to Twitter, one thing you should make sure never happens are system outages.”
I couldn’t agree more. After the weekend I’ve had, that is especially true. Nothing was working for me all weekend. The RCN “customer service” representative actually said to me (and I quote) “I have no reason to speak with you further.” This after I thought we had been having such a nice conversation. Yes, my problem wasn’t solved, but we were chatting and laughing and he was asking me questions about Second Life. Very friendly, I thought, but then he totally dissed me! I was hurt. He left me high and dry with my problem unsolved. So I do not have the patience for another “cool” Internet tool that’s not going to function properly.
I’ll keep tabs on the Twitter and FriendFeed chatter and see what others say when these tools come online (most are still in beta) and see if any of them are truly viable.
InFomentation 
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