I follow politics, but I avoid the topic online. There are too many people out there who seem meek that will pounce like a tiger on you the instant you say something negative about their candidate or their party. This is not a fight I want to provoke or be a part of.

The way Twitter works is that you either follow or unfollow someone. I propose a mute button; something you can press that will remove them from your stream without actually unfollowing them. The reason why unfollowing can be seen as an unfriendly thing to do is that refollowing sends an email to the person, showing that you in fact unfollowed them at some point. Although it’s happened to me, I shrug it off. Not everyone can like my stream and that’s OK. However, some people’s egos bruise more easily and I think it would be better for the community if Twitter just put in a mechanism that quieted someone while they rant and rave about whatever it is they’re passionate about at the moment.

I realize there are third party apps like Tweetdeck, but not everyone uses it. It would be better if Twitter put this feature in at the source of their APIs rather than depending on your favorite third party app to implement it.

I wasn’t around when Twitter first started. If I was, I’d have the username “starman” instead of missing out on it by four hours.

From what people tell me, it was supposed to be a service where you could tell people what you’re up to. Hence, “what are you doing?”. The tagline worked at first, but Twitter has evolved beyond the humdrum answers like “having cold pizza for breakfast”.

Instead now we post thoughts, have conversations (small ones, I hope), tell jokes, ask questions. “What are you doing?” no longer seems to fit. The tagline of identi.ca is “what’s up, <nickname>?” which is better, but even that doesn’t fit when your micropost is a question itself.

My proposal is that Twitter change its tagline to something all encompassing:

“what do you have to say?”

It works better than “what’s up?”. It works for questions, comments, replies. It fits for anything someone wants to write to a microblog.

Pownce was Twitter’s competition last year, but it hasn’t caught on due to its slow site and confusing interface. It’s nice that the converstations stay self-contained, but it’s a walled garden; you can’t see any parts of the conversations outside of Pownce itself.

Plurk is very similar to Pownce except it doesn’t allow you to share files, but it does keep the conversation self-contained. Its interface is quirky to some, bothersome to others.

Identi.ca is almost exactly like Twitter except it’s open source which means that people can build updates to the system and not have to wait several months or years for features to be pushed, unlike Twitter which hasn’t pushed any new features in years (hello, Twitter, how about a search function?).

Friendfeed has to be the worse offender. I didn’t realize this until this morning, but FriendFeed allows you to reply to Tweets inside or outside FriendFeed. If you don’t reply outside FriendFeed, the reply stays in FF and whoever wrote the Tweet may never see it. Also, it could spawn a whole new set of replies in FF itself which the original poster may never see.

So, to sum up, I did a quick and dirty diagram of the state of the microblogging conversations.

Layer 0 shows ping.fm at the top which blasts the messages to the services on layer 1. Layer 2 is where things get messy. You can see pownce and plurk’s walled gardens where nothing gets out. Identi.ca has replies which can be seen inside and outside the site.

The relationship between Twitter and FriendFeed is the messiest. Messages are pulled into FF from Twitter and the replies, in different shades of green on layer 2, shows how replies can come directly from Twitter, from FF with replies to Twitter directly, or only going to Friendfeed itself.

It’s a mess. Hopefully this will all shake out in the next year.

Over the last few months, it’s been getting more and more difficult to funnel conversations from all these blog posts, tweets, diggs, plurks, friendfeeds, pictures, and videos in one place. Most recently, Plurk as come online which has the advantage of self-contained conversations, but with the disadvantage of not seeing friends’ plurks inside those conversations. That means that unlike Twitter, you can’t just jump into something, or see a reply with a URL that might interest you.

FriendFeed tries to do this, but doesn’t succeed 100%. It pulls posts that your friends make on other sites, but the replies to those posts don’t necessarily show up in the friendfeed itself.

For example, if Bob makes a blog post about the pictures he takes, they’ll show up on FriendFeed under two categories: 1) the blog post itself, and 2) the new pictures on Flickr. From there, you can post on FriendFeed “hey, nice pictures”, but the people on Flickr won’t see those comments. Conversely, people on Flickr won’t see the comments on FriendFeed.

Ping.fm is not a new service, but now that Twitter has been going down more often than an <insert dirty joke here>, people are turning to ping.fm to broadcast their microblogs to several services like Twitter, Jaiku, and Plurk so that they reach the most number of people.

That’s fine, and I’m thinking about doing that myself, but then where do the comments go? If Twitter’s up, some replies will go there, some to Plurk, and maybe some to Jaiku (for the three people using it).

I started drawing a diagram of all this and it became a mess when I tried to handle FriendFeed reading in replies to tweets and replies in Pownce.

So how do we resolve this? Currently, I can’t find any service that properly manages it all. Something needs to aggregate all your feeds from all your subscriptions, and filter out what’s redundant, while posting in the appropriate places. That’s not a good solution for now since there are multiple services, but that’s the best that can be done until someone comes up with One Service To Rule Them All.

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.

2. Tell everyone on Twitter to move to Plurk.

3. Decide what you’re going to do with your time now that there’s no wait between responses.

4. Work on that karma!

5. Beg the Plurk developers for an API.

6. Convince yourself that a headless dog is a good mascot.

7. Be one with the timeline.

8. Come up with a neat pun with “plurk” in it (eg: “plurkinator”).

9. Trade in the birds you bought when you became a twitter fan for a headless dog.

10. Apologize to all the people on Twitter you called a “jerk”.

11. Start thinking in the third person.

12. Buy a T-shirt that says “Plurk me” (this step written by Sara Streeter)

“plurk is hard it has instructions” – irina slutsky via Twitter

The name

The name still kind of bothers me. I’d like to say it’s growing on me, but it’s not. Twitter is such a cute name and it doesn’t sound like something a bunch of teenagers came up with while getting high on model glue. Plurk is one of those names that sounds like was just random and silly. However, it does lend itself to being used as a verb which does tend to happen a lot in the web 2.0 world, so kudos for that.

Timeline

The first thing you notice with Plurk is that the timeline moves horizontally from right-to-left, not the more accepted left-to-right. I believe they made the timeline the way they did because in order to read a timeline left-to-right, you have to start reading the messages with the text inside the timeline. As cute as the timeline is, I still like the simple vertically-scrolling timeline we all know and love. I don’t follow a lot of people, but I can’t imagine a horizontally scrolling timeline filled vertically with followers would be easy to manage after a while. How far back does this timeline go?

Encapsulated conversations

One of the great things about Plurk is that the conversation doesn’t spill out into the public timeline. With Twitter, responses to individuals are seen by all. This is both a shortcoming of the Twitter web interface and the third party apps that don’t even try to round up conversations. Plurk does what Pownce does and keeps all the responses to a message self-contained. I applaud this feature. This morning, @banannie (banannie on Plurk) noticed the “plurk page” option from the conversation’s menu. Click it, and the conversation shows up on its own page. So far as I know you can’t have more than one level of a conversation.

Built-in karma

@dossy created this amazing tool for Twitter called Twitter Karma. It shows you all the people you’re following, and who’s following you back so you can see if you’re following more people that are following you. Plurk has a built-in karma level which gives you a real-time status of how much of a selfish jerk you’re being .

Mobile Plurk

Plurk does have a rather nifty mobile interface. Just go to http://www.plurk.com/m and see a nice mobile-friendly timeline.

Real-time updates. Sorta.

Plurk’s main web site shows in your browser title and in the timeline that there are updates, but it doesn’t actually refresh the browser itself, you have to click on the link to see the updates. This is good and bad because on one hand, the browser can’t tell if you’re actually looking at the timeline when updates come in but at the same time, maybe I just want automatic refreshes. This could tax their system as they become more popular. I’d like to see this as an option.

No API, so no Pluhrl.

Currently, there’s no API for Plurk, so don’t expect a Twhirl-type app for Plurk anytime soon. There’s also no SMS, but there was a post on their blog this morning that said “Carrier Is Coming. That is all”. Is SMS coming? Let’s hope so.

Verbs

One thing that bugs me about Plurk is the use of a dropdown menu to select verbs for your messages. For example, instead of typing “I think my Chevy is cool”, you select a menu of verbs such as “thinks, says, feels, was, asks” to preface your note. I find this to be extremely annoying because I just want to type. The list isn’t large, but it’s still an extra action I have to do to create a message. There’s a “freeform” option which I now use which allows me to type without the use of a verb.

@ and d

You can send public notes to users using the @ symbol like Twitter does, but to send a private note, you have to use another menu to tell the system who will be able to see the note. I tried using the “d” method of sending a private message like Twitter does and it didn’t work, the message was public.

Cliques

One of the absolute worst terms you can use to group people together is the word “clique”. The name suggests people that don’t want to bother with people outside their group. They need to use a new name for this feature.

Friend/follower

With Plurk, you can choose to simply follow a user, or friend them, or both. I don’t understand why clicking “add as a friend” automatically sets the option to follow. It’s one extra step I shouldn’t have to do.

Other miscellaneous items

• You can edit messages!
• It’s not as simple as it should be
• Too many drop-down menus
• I like the use of RSS
• I like that you can embed pictures
• What’s with the headless mascot?
• Stars are given out to people that got the most plurk users via invites. How about Twitter users that used word of mouth?
• The use of “user” in the URL for a user (eg: http://www.plurk.com/user/starman)
• Using the scroll wheel to navigate the timeline is cool.
• No search

I think that Plurk has a lot of promise. If they can focus on simplicity, get an API, support SMS, and get rid of the name “clique”, I think that they can become a serious contender to Twitter and Pownce. I like how Plurk is trying to expand on Twitter, but they have to understand the power of simplicity. Ask me in a month if I still like the name.

You can find me on Plurk as starman.

When I started working on my “better Twitter”, one of the coolest ideas I had was to marry GPS with your message, so that you can say “I’m having a beer” and you could also geotag your location to show which bar you were at. This was the idea that motivated me into working on the project until I had one sobering moment:

Saying where you are might be cool, but it’s also saying where you’re NOT.

Maybe I have a streak of paranoia in me, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be the one responsible for creating a system that allowed others to track people. Dare I use the word “stalk”?

A system like that would be excellent for finding friends, which is actually what Brightkite does now. If you’re at Yankee Stadium, you can see if someone on your friends list is also there. You would also be able to perhaps meet up with people that you may have only seen on Twitter or Seesmic.

I decided to create some tips for people that may help in at least minimizing any fear they may have.

• Only allow trusted friends to see where you are.
• Keep your list of trusted friends small.
• Don’t broadcast your location on Twitter.
• Make sure that the system will be able to delete where you’ve been if you request it.
• If you feel the need to talk about your day, mention it while on your way back.
• Don’t mark someone as a trusted friend if you haven’t actually spoken to them.

I’d also like to suggest that the system offering such information about a person’s location should log the IP address of any computer used to access that information.

I can see in the very near future that people will be sending their positions on a regular basis, I’m just hoping that anyone looking at that information will do so responsibly.

I can’t stop and wonder if this is the kind of thing that’s going to spread to the common person. Oh sure, people can videotape themselves on Youtube looking like a complete ass, but that’s not social media. I see the people that are working on social media to be people that want to use audio and/or video to communicate with others, and I don’t see the common person doing that. Most people don’t even know what social media is, and I would say that even in 10 years when more people are made aware of it, it’s still not going to be a big hit among most people simply because they’re afraid of being on camera or using a microphone. The perception of how you look and sound to others could be a serious factor in the acceptance of social media in the mainstream.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post: will social media stay a niche or am I wrong and we’re pioneers in a realm that will explode in the years to come?