Plurk survived WWDC, Twitter did not
Yesterday was Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Fransisco, California. Despite how the media will tell you that Apple is a gnat in the computing world, thousands of nerds take their pilgrimage to San Fransisco to meet up with other nerds and talk about C, Cocoa, CoreFoundation, Objective C, and other odd terms not spoken outside their little world.
For those that can’t make it to the conference, there’s the internet which allows people to chat about what’s been announced. Some people talk about it in chat rooms, but with new social networking tools like Twitter and Plurk, it’s easy to put a thought “out there” and have people comment back.
Twitter’s been having serious problems lately. They can’t stay online for a significant amount of time without becoming slow, asking users to throttle back, or just plain crashing. It’s sad because Twitter’s a great application which I believe is going to go the way of Wordstar someday if they don’t keep up.
Plurk came onto the scene a few weeks ago after Leo Laporte mentioned it on TWiT. The big difference internally between Plurk and Twitter is that Plurk, according to their web site, was designed from the ground up to scale. This means that as more people use it, the system grows to accommodate them. Plurk has had its hiccups and is relatively new so there aren’t as many users on it, but in a little over a week I have 1/3 of my followers on Plurk and the system has managed to keep up with everyone else with large followings.
During the WWDC keynote, Twitter died. Earlier in the day they asked users to throttle down to 10 requests/hour. They already asked users to throttle back to 20 requests/hour two weeks ago and the system hasn’t recovered from that and nobody’s been able to go back to the normal 30 requests/hour without getting the dreaded “limit exceeded” error.
While people were getting errors on Twitter, Plurk ran like a champ. It had a few little sluggish periods, but with something as big as a WWDC keynote where Steve Jobs announced the iPhone 2 (minus a lull during the period of web-apps-ported-to-the-iPhone demos), it worked. People started conversations in Plurk and friends commented on them like tiny IRC chat rooms. It was glorious to see a new system take on the WWDC and survive.
In the meantime, Twitter has $13 million and still hasn’t fixed their system.
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Comments
Are there any stats on how many tweets were made regarding the WWDC as opposed to plurks? I know Twitter is struggling but surely they had a much bigger demand over the last 24 hours. Plurk is still new, if it was under the same pressure Twitter was they might have been “stressed out” too.
@SIGEPJEDI:
Plurk has a LOT of users. Not as many as Twitter, but the number’s growing all the time.
Nice post, Starman!
As soon as Plurk gets some kind of major endorsement from the “Internet famous” community, it’s bye bye for Twitter. I’ve had so many friends tell me that they “hate” Twitter solely because it’s not stable. I also like to put “words” in quotation marks. 
One day we’ll all go back to Twitter and it will be nothing but alerts for blog post and requests to “come chat with me live!”
Are there any stats on how many tweets were made regarding the WWDC as opposed to plurks? I know Twitter is struggling but surely they had a much bigger demand over the last 24 hours. Plurk is still new, if it was under the same pressure Twitter was they might have been “stressed out” too.
your last sentience echos exactly my sentiments. i mean.. i love twitter.. and i don’t have the skilz to “fix” the problems.. but they really do need to find someone who does have those “skillz” … or else they are going to sink like… a… giant whale.