Why Twitter > Plurk
In the last few weeks, I’ve been spending a decent amount of my social networking time over at Plurk (here is my page). My first reaction is that it is much better than Twitter for conversations (with much less down time).
They solved many of the problems that Twitter has – threaded replies being the biggest. You post a plurk and see as direct replies what people have to say. It ’s a real conversation instead of the hunting and pecking that is involved with Twitter. If you go back to a plurk from yesterday, you see the entrie conversation. With Twitter, you have a serious problem with that.
Then I noticed Karma. The general idea is that the more you contribute to conversations in a positive way, the more karma you get. The more karma you get, the more options (avatar, keywords, emoticons) you have available. And on the face of it, it seems like a good idea. In theory if you spam the community you’d be penalized.
But what it ends up doing is creating conversation for conversation’s sake. If you want karma, you have to plurk all the time. You go to sleep you lose karma. Which irritates people. And really, what is karma but a way just to keep people on the site?
Really what they should be focusing on is the utility. The ability to bring the conversations to other devices, sites, applications, etc.
Twitter has that. In a post on TechCruch today, Arrington notes that Twitter is branding itself as a communicaiton utility. The real power of Twitter is that you can use it for so many different purposes and from so many different devices. The threading will work eventually. They’ll figure it out.
And soon enough, you’ll see Twitter being used as an integration platform by players trying to tie together different forms of communication. Meanwhile, Plurk will be a glorified chat room.
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