Hmm. It looks like Plurk is down, too.
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Twitter lost a database.
Well, that would explain it. Though as of this writing, it looks like they may have found it again.
Kudos for the increased communication, though.
Steve Hodson has an interesting post about, again, Scoble’s position of influence in this sphere, particularly among early adopters of new technologies.
With the obvious exception of Gmail, Google’s forays into social networking do not seem to have been as well-received. There is orkut, of course. Orkut is huge in some parts of the globe, so maybe this is a bad example; or at least, it’s an example of being somewhat North-America-centric in my perspective. That said, North America is where I’m at, and here, Orkut is no big splash. While even the non-internet savvy in North America are familiar with dozens of news stories about MySpace and Facebook, I doubt Orkut has popped up on most folks’ radar.
Jaiku seems to be in about the same boat. I had never heard of it until Google bought it, though I realize that many other early adopters had heard of it. It has most or all of twitter’s features, and a few of FriendFeeds, in that it can import feeds from other sites, such as Twitter.
Continue reading ‘What About Jaiku?’
The implementation of Plurk’s side-scrolling UI is certainly nothing to scoff at. It works perfectly, and I imagine represents the product of hours of coding and testing.
That said, it’s probably also one of the more polarizing features of Plurk. People seem to love it or hate it. Strangely, people don’t always stop using Plurk simply because they dislike it, so clearly Plurk is already offering something compelling.
I’m one who wishes there were at least an alternative to the main UI… there is the mobile view but at the moment, it is lacking some of the other features of the web view: alerts, ability to see your list of friends or your karma… It would be nice to have a vertical list view which still keeps all the other features of the main web view. The mobile explore page seems to indicate that more features will be added, so maybe it will turn into a little better alternative.
I also realized that my experience with plurk’s UI does depend on the computer I’m using. Using a computer with plenty of RAM and other resources, it doesn’t bother me as much as when I’m using one with a little less overhead. So a vertical view might be a nice friendly gesture to those with slower computers, as well.
You might have noticed that the “With Friends” view recently disappeared from individual user pages. Twitter Status has a post explaining this, possibly in response to an apparent outcry; it seems people were subscribing to the feed generated by this page. The feed is still available, but requires user authentication, which many feed readers do not support.
In view of recent/ongoing technical issues, I think the move to dispense with the “With Friends” view was a prudent one; they point out that it was rarely accessed but still computationally expensive. Any time you remove any feature, though, you are going to hear an outcry from those who used it, and you certainly want to attempt to meet all your users needs.
What do you think? Do you miss the “With Friends” view? Can you see a need to subscribe to those feeds?
I’m not sure how fast they are going to continue handing out invites, but I had a beta invite for FriendBinder within an hour of signing up for one.
I could summarize it, but I would only be re-inventing what Louis Gray summarized on his blog.
I would say the sign up and service-adding process is very slick; for most services, all you need to do is enter your username. Adding friends from the other services was trivial, one click each.
FriendBinder is very close to an imaginary service I thought up and was wanting about two years ago… I’ll be interested to see if it is as useful as the (at the time) mythical service I was picturing.
Incidentally, I think del.icio.us could also easily step into this space, by allowing you to aggregate items from other feeds as well. If they did that, and marketed the social networking side of del.icio.us a little better, I think it’s possible I might even prefer it to some of the other services currently available.
… can be found here.
Felix at comments.deasil.com writes in Escaping the Scobleverse:
As another test, go to Friendfeed and click around on people’s profiles and look at the right nav where it lists their subscriptions. These seem to be the 12 most popular people in a person’s list, alphabetized. See how little it varies - if you see something significantly different from Taylor, Brogan, Messina, Pirillo, Winer, Calacanis, Laporte, Le Meur, mashable, Buchheit, arrington, Scoble, Beale, Rubel and Hawk - you’ve found an outlier.
Steve Spalding at How To Split an Atom tells you how to know if you’re an early adopter.