Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
Twitter’s downtime over the last couple of months has really pissed off a lot of people, most of all me. And I’m a #1 Twitter advocate. I mentioned it as a conference, been interviewed in the papers on Twitter, I wrote how to guides, encouraged an SMU Twitter challenge, the works.
I tried to be tolerant, but waking up every morning and finding out that Twitter isn’t working just disappoints.
First I turned to FriendFeed, with the new Room function, I was hopeful that it would be a nice replacement, but that has yet to gain any traction, at least in the Singaporeans Room. It just lacks the personal element that Twitter has. (Had?)
Enter Plurk. It has the same personal element that Twitter did, an innovative timeline system (takes some time to get used to) and a personality that I’d call… quirky. There are some elements I don’t like, let informing me about comments on posts I don’t care about, and the timeline interface is a little chunky and takes some time getting used to (I can’t imagine my 300 followers on it), but the introduction of cliques has officially won me over.
Cliques
Basically these are groups or segments that you can form within your followers. I blogged once about using Twitter like IRC and spamming the rest of your contact. No worries about that on Plurk. I’ve separated my chatter from my proper Plurking, and am very happy with the results. I can have fun, personal conversations without disturbing the rest of my followers.
Since Twitter seems to be spending all its time just putting out fires, I don’t think I can look forward to similar improvements from them anytime soon.
In the last 24 hours that I’ve joined Plurk, I’ve seen plenty of Twitter folk move over. chrisbrogan, colinwalker, daphnemaia, derrickkwa, foxtwo, hendri, howiec, jljohansen, kevinlim, kevyn, litford, marinamartin, mhisham, mintea, moby74, nicole85, ridz84, rinaz, scabr, sentosagirl, shahw, sonnygill, waynesutton and yuhui. Add them by typing http://plurk.com/user/[username].
That’s almost 10% of my network on Twitter. The value for Twitter now is the 300 or so contacts I painfully built up over five months. But unfortunately at this point in time, I’d rather move than stick with a network that doesn’t work. Do connect with me on Plurk at http://plurk.com/user/uniquefrequency
Tags: bye twitter, hello plurk, move from twitter to plurk, Plurk, plurk cliques, plurk rocks, twitter downtime, twitter sucks, uniquefrequency
Posted in Plurk | 9 Comments »
Friday, April 25th, 2008
The article’s out today! I thought it’s pretty good. Hopefully more people will read it and get onto Twitter.
That said, I’m going to be a little cautious about Twitter. Steven Hodson blogged about some of Twitter’s troubles, financially, bringing us back to harsh reality that you can have the best product in the world in the Web2.0 space, but you better have a monetisation plan. Frederic from The Last Podcast updated us a couple of days ago about how Twitter has rolled out ads in Japan (which makes sense since they are so big in Japan)
All the financial worries plus the recent downtime over the weekend and Twitter’s lead architect leaving makes for a slightly worrying future for Twitter. Here’s hoping they can pull their act together soon.
Follow me on Twitter: @uniquefrequency
Tags: microblogging, monetization plan, the last podcast, today twitter article, twitter, twitter ads in japan, twitter caution, twitter downtime, twitter monetisation, twitter monetization, twitter worries, uniquefrequency, winextra
Posted in social media, twitter | 11 Comments »
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
I’m a huge fan of Twitter, but it’s been wonky since Saturday and today it just got too much.
I was happy to take it as random downtime, and wait for it to get back to normal by tomorrow. Until I read something from Bryan Person:
My friend Jack Hodgson is convinced that Twitter’s death is coming, and that we should start preparing for it now. It’s nights like tonight that I really think he’s onto something.
What? Twitter’s death? Life without Twitter? No way!
Death or no death, people around the blogosphere are beginning to notice. Dan York also weighs in on how we have come to rely on Twitter, while Frederic and Paris Lemon approach the issue the same way I do. For the tool that enables conversation and for people to stay connected, Twitter sure isn’t communicating much about what is going wrong.
It does make you think how this affects organisations who have invested time into Twitter like @downingstreet (for the British Prime Minister’s office) and @deltaairlines as a means of keeping in touch with the public? A loss of faith in Twitter? Migration to another platform?
If Twitter does go down, who will you turn to? Scoble thinks it’s FriendFeed. I’d go for Facebook Chat, if only they’d implement it for me already.
Tags: @deltaairlines, @downingstreet, bryan person, facebook chat vs twitter, friendfeed, friendfeed as an alternative to twitter, friendfeed to replace twitter, life without twitter, no twitter, twitter, twitter down, twitter downtime, twitter's death, what would you do without twitter
Posted in Blogs, social media, twitter | 2 Comments »
