Twitter Plays It Tough

Having just signed up at Plurk and getting into the swing of things, I can safely say that I will not be needing my Twitter account anymore. Conversation flows much easier on Plurk and most of the friends I had on Twitter are already present on it’s rival service.

This morning I tried to delete my account, Twitter did want any of it. I was presented with the following message:

I understand that they are having problems but disabling the ability to delete accounts? That’s not cricket. I have spoken to a few people who have tried to do the same but have had the same notice appear, are Twitter really that desperate to hold onto users?

Plurk: The New Twitter?

Yesterday I was viewing my Twitter feed and catching up on any Tweets I had missed when I came across a few people mentioning a new service named Plurk. Thinking it was another social media aggregator, I scrolled on to read the rest of my feeds.

But then my curiosity got the better of me. Clicking into the search bar at the top of my browser, thinking that I was about to discover and online version of the board game “Kerplunk”, I typed in the name and swiftly hit enter.

Firstly Plurk’s meta-description of their site is as follows:

Plurk is a social journal that let’s you publish, share your thoughts, emo-ness, “!%#%”#” and loves. What is up, my friend? See what other people are doing …

OK, so it’s a social platform that can take the piss out of itself, I like that. Looking at the front page, it sells itself as a very similar service to Twitter, one that boasts a few extra features and a much nicer user interface. It also has a logo which is a Headless Dog…..The screenshot below demonstrates the layout:

Having befriended a few friends from Twitter on Plurk, I set to work trying out the service. First impressions are that the timeline is a very good idea, it shows you who posted and when and allows you to be able to reply to their message with a click to open a dropdown reply form (shown again below):

Word on the internet is that Plurk don’t want user’s developing third party applications for this service, although I have seen no official word on this. Twitter’s real plus is that it allows you to post and receive via SMS, browser, addon or client. So far only Gtalk is supported by Plurk.

There is however a clever sidebar addition for Firefox which utilises the mobile version of the site. You can download this addon by clicking here.

Have I sold Plurk and you think you want to try it? Sign up via this link and you will automatically be added to my friends list.

Pownce

No, I’m not going to ambush you as you walk home in the evening.

I am however talking about a web service I am trying out, you may even have seen the green logo to the right of this post. Pownce is:

Pownce is a way to send stuff to your friends. What kind of stuff? You can send just about anything: music, photos, messages, links, events, and more. You can do it all on our web site, or install our lightweight desktop software that lets you get out of the browser.

Or in lehman’s terms, it’s a way to get your online friends together and leave messages and status updates instead of having to text/phone/email them. You could say it’s a Twitter clone. You could say I am marvellous but we all know I am not.

Click the link and come and add me as a friend, it sure beats going to and from each other’s blogs and leaving replies that nobody else knows what is about!