Nethead's Blog: 06/01/2009

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Plurk and Twitter

First let me start by saying, I love using Plurk! Together with friends we have created a wonderful community on Plurk. But, there is a problem, No Official API with which we could have some Wonderful third party tools to access Plurk. There are a couple of iPhone apps and some failed web apps/Blackberry apps.

A moblie web page does exist for Plurk, but it's just not a great way to access Plurk.

I created a Plurk account on June 1st 2008 and never looked back. I basically stopped using Twitter after I created my Plurk account. (My Twitter account was created in April '07)

Why? Friend KDFrawg said it best last year in his blog post: Twitter and Plurk, Announcements and Conversations.

Then something happened in March/April 2009, I got tired of carrying a backpack to work every morning and back home every night. Why was I carrying this bag? It was to tote my notebook back and forth from home to work and work to home. I used the notebook to listen to podcasts/steaming radio/audio books and best of all to access Plurk, it gave me a solid 2hours a day with which to connect to friends.

I noticed a plug for a Standard earphone on my Blackberry. So I looked on the net and found some apps for the Blackberry which would let me listen to streaming audio and I was able load mp3 music to the Blackberry via the 8gb mem card I had placed into it. I then found out about Blackberry apps for twitter. (yes, I know iPhone does all this, but the Blackberry was 'free')

I noticed a number of Plurk friends where using twitter in much the same way we used Plurk.

I then started every morning using the Blackberry to 'tweet' with the friends and using Twitter like an 'off-line' Plurk.

It's been a busy time at work but, I noticed you could run Tweetdeck and get notices when a "tweet" came in. So I created a group in Tweetdeck of my known Plurk friends, which allowed me to keep updated with them while I worked. I was still using Plurk, but found it easier to keep up with Plurk friends via Tweetdeck.

I started tweeting on #followfriday all of the Plurk friend friends I had found/friended on twitter. Doing so with the hope we could grow the community on twitter as we have on Plurk.

So after a few months of getting back into using Twitter, I see how we have turned twitter from just a "notice" site into a bit of what we have on Plurk with just a different interface.

Maybe Twitter is our Plurk App?