Ed. note: if you’re new to microblogging and Twitter, please feel free to just mark this post as read, ignore the email, move on to the next post, etc. It’s from a comment I left on a “Friendfeed and Twitter, where are we going with all this?” post on www.stoweboyd.com
Boy, I’d love to know some of the answers behind these questions. We’ve all talked for a long time about the relationships and “cast of characters” on Twitter being another reason “we” “won’t” leave (haven’t left).
But another thing I don’t hear a whole bunch about, when these FriendFeed-Twitter-Plurk(PLURK?!)-Pownce-Jaiku angst-a-thons come up, is the Twitter ecosystem. It seems to me that’s a big part of Twitter’s competitive edge and utility. No matter how cool the upstarts are, are they interoperable with Twitter’s “accessories” the many applications Twitter now feeds and is fed from?
On a regular basis on Twitter I use: Seesmic, Qik, Utterz, Summize, Tweetscan, Terraminds, TwitterBerry, Twhirl, is.gd, Tweetburner, Jott, TwitterFone, [Twittergram], Foxy/Twittytunes, Tweeterboard, Hashtags, Tweme, Rememberthemilk and Xpensr. Those last two are my favorite new use of Twitter: as a convenient, centralized “command line” to get data into my applications.
There are dozens and dozens of 3rd party applications that work with and through Twitter, not to mention the various bots (everything from mindfulness chimes to mainstream media news alerts to pr0n links) that have been created. I can think offhand of dozens of custom scripts, hacks, web and desktop and mobile clients, widgets and more that friends use. There are probably thousands of things “living” in Twitter world. There’s also a tremendous circulatory system of RSS feeds going into and out of Twitter streams and tying in other platforms like blogs and Facebook.
Can all this stuff be adapted to feed off of (and into) other APIs quickly and easily, should the momentum shift to another service? I’m not techie enough to answer that. But it seems to be a somewhat formidable barrier to entry, even at this embryonic stage.
Of course, Twhirl has been adapted to work with FriendFeed as well as Twitter, so perhaps it’s quite simple. Perhaps.
Seriously… PLURK?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Plurk is interesting – a friend sent me an invite a few days ago and I gave it serious consideration. It melded some features of simile (simile.mit.edu) and twitter, but I stared for a long time before I figured out what reeeeeally bugged me: history is to the RIGHT. That’s right, call me Western-culture-centric, but history should be to the LEFT with new stuff added to the right… I was navigating a 9-yr old’s (creepy) feed for five minutes before I realized why her birthday party happened AFTER she was excited about her friends coming to her birthday party. Maybe there’s an age requirement???
I don’t know where we’re going either – but I don’t believe that Plurk or any other variant will ‘kill’ Twitter. The only thing that can do that is Twitter itself.
It is about the people in the end, but there is something to be said for both the interface and the interaction.
I hear a lot of people like Brian talking about the left-to-right thing on Plurk. It kind of cracks me up – because it’s not about Western culture – it’s about orientation of linguistic v. mathematic.
We read left-to-right. We do math (and numbers) from right to left… hence why it’s 1, 10, 100 and not 1, 01, 001…
Programmers don’t go left or right – they do omnidirectional! 
But that said… those of us who are hooked on Twitter have developed our own usage patterns. We’ve figured out how to do things in an effective manner to get what we want out of it… socially, informationally, and experience-wise.
So to each new service that arises, we look at it to try and see if we can make it function on the same level for ourselves. If we can’t? We don’t adopt it. If we can? it goes in our short list.
Plurk is interesting, but time consuming to me on levels that make it less appealing. It’s fun for entertainment when I’m mobile and want to just drop into conversations – but it’s not by any means going to replace Twitter for me.
Thanks for the excellent resource list.
Plurk blows. But you make me feel bad when you list all the things you do with Twitter. I get it; after you get finished with all the Twitter apps, you don’t have time for Plurk