So, I've been following the rabbit hole of online social networking (which they should just shorten to OSN already) for a while now. It took me awhile to get on board with twitter but once I did, I loved the potential. When twitter started having the "fail whale" appear lots of people began to look for a new playground.

That's when I started to hear about Plurk.

Potential:

I'm still trying out its potential for business owners. It is far more lucrative than twitter, but the ability to have conversations in real time is an awesome power. I'm hearing a lot about Plurk "replacing" Twitter but I have to disagree. Twitter allows you to search for people in your industry and follow them through microblogging. Plurk lets you start conversations, meet other people in your friend's network through mutual interests as well as answer the eternal question: what are you doing?

What Plurk is like:

Plurk is not a linear format like Twitter which threw me off at first. Instead it is more of a web type design. You can click on plurks you want to read and then reply. Other people can reply too, so you can have a huge meeting of mind in a 5 minute span of time just to answer one question. While on Twitter you can have an instant response, watching it all be threaded in one box is pretty exhilarating.

I will admit, my first day on Plurk, I wasn't impressed. The colors bothered me, the timeline confused me and I thought the random plurk creatures were creepy.

[Caption] Is that a headless dog? Who designed this?

Plurk vs. Twitter:

But, like any new experience, it took me a few hours to get used it and soon I felt compulsively drawn to Plurk. The great thing about instant interaction is that after a few days with Plurk I felt like I knew my friends better than with 3 weeks of twitter. Both will have their ups and downs, but both can be important tools.

Personally, I hope someone makes a site or application that combines them. They should call it pitter because it sounds like raindrops and that is the essence of both these sites: the little droplets of conversation and thought that make up a storm.

Contagious Media:

I saw someone comment on Plurk that the willingness of so many twitters to try this new site was interesting. I think so too. It took me months to give in and sign up for twitter but only a day or to to try Plurk.

This, I believe, is a trend that we are seeing and will continue to see, in regard to new interactive mediums. MySpace took a while to catch on, Facebook, much less. Perhaps this is an offshoot of Moore's law that the speed of technology acceptance grows exponentially. As Generation Y's influence grows and their desire to be immersed in the power of social internet has more power, more people outside of that generation will get involved as well. And as people as a whole discover that the "new" is nothing to be afraid of, they will more rapidly get involved with things that previously frightened them.

These are just my thoughts. Let me know what you think about the acceptance of new technology. Am I just becoming an early adopter or is this a trend? Will Plurk and Twitter go head-to-head? I'm sure there will be more on this as I continue to discover and learn.

Tags: Trends

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 5:31 am and is filed under Internet Research, Veribatim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.