posted on Sep 15, 2008 by
Justin So in today’s world of Web 2.0, everyone knows what everyone else is doing because of micro-blogging. If you’re not sure what micro-blogging is, here’s my definition. Micro-blogging is the idea of posting blogs of 140 characters or less. Because of the shortness of the blogs, they are posted at a much more frequent nature. Most people update what they are doing at that time while others use it to update a new blog post or a song that they just listened to.
Because I like to think that I have a pretty good knowledge of what is going on in the Web 2.0 world, I have accounts on a few of these micro-blogging sites. Following the release of Twitter at the 2007 SXSW, I signed up for it. I used it for a while but I didn’t get much out of it. But I’ve written about that before. I’m using it again on a pretty regular basis. I like to post things that I’ve done, heard or have opinions on.
Twitter is the biggest micro-blogging app out there with 2,955,142 users based on numbers from TwitDir. With Twitter being the oldest of the micro-blogging sites, it has the most users and probably the most active. Also it is the most well known. Just last night I was watching CNN and they mentioned they are on Twitter as well. There seems to be dozens of ways, if not hundreds, to post a tweet these days. I personally like to use SocialThing these days. As an aside, I still have 1 invite to share. I use it to post to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, and Pownce at the same time. If I’m not at my computer, I’ll just use my phone to send a text message. It’s just so easy to tweet with all the ways out there.
Pownce is a creation of Kevin Rose and his friends. It was released not long after Twitter to beta users. You can post messages just like Twitter but you can also post files, links or events. One of the coolest features that I have seen on Pownce is that you can take a group of your friends and assign them to a set. This will allow you to only see what a select group of your friends are doing.
Plurk is the newcomer to the group. I’ve been with it for about 5 months I guess. It’s very similar to the others with the ability to share what’s going on but the timeline is what makes it interesting. Plurk shows you a linear timeline going from left to right with what you and your friends have to say. Another cool feature is the qualifiers it uses. These will follow your name in your plurk and come before what you have to say. For example, I could have one that reads “Justin hopes he wins at fantasy football today.” The is the qualifier there. They give you about a dozen or so to use or you can go freestyle and say what you want.
For me, the choice is simple, Twitter. It is the most well known, most used, and oldest. I am not a big player in any of the three but 4 people read my Plurks, 14 read my Pownces, and 137 read my Tweets. It’s easy to see the one I use more than the others.
There are cool features in all of them. I really like the timeline in Plurk and the ability to easily share files in Pownce but the ease of Twitter makes it my favorite. It may not be the best in a lot of eyes but I think it is. Tell me what you think either here or at my Twitter, Plurk or Pownce accounts.
Twitter - http://twitter.com/digijustin
Pownce - http://pownce.com/digijustin/
Plurk - http://www.plurk.com/user/digijustin
I’m also looking to meet new people and see what others are saying.
Popularity: 80% [?]
