There’s a bit of unrest among the Twitter natives. The service is up and it’s down and…it is what it is.

What it is to me - I’ve been using Twitter for almost 2 years, and as I’ve said I’ve been on long enough to fall in love and out of love and back in love with it. Now 2x over. I also wrote a response to a Brian Solis post about how disappointed I was in their handling of certain seeming violations in their Terms of Service. Then I felt guilt about piling on without knowing both sides of the story.

Twitter was - almost - the first (anyone remember Dodgeball?) and despite scaling issues have done it better than anyone else. Jaiku is pretty much done (Is Google the place where Web 2.0 apps go to die? Jaiku? Delicious? Dodgeball?) with no movement since the acquisition. But now there are new option seemingly every day, Plurk, identi.ca and Posterous among them. FriendFeed is a big favorite among early adopters, with the opportunity to have longer conversations and comments for each of you and your friends items.

There are also push services, like Ping.fm and BlogIt, which can push status updates and blog posts to a number of services at the same time. Personally, I feel weird about that. I have many “friends” across the different services and it feels like I’m spamming them instead of concentrating on delivering unique content. My issues, not yours

Twitter (and Facebook) is where the my conversations are and where I’ve met people who have become personally important to me. There are talented people, who I’ll never meet, who I look at their Twitter pages each day. I’ve had job interviews and opportunities because of Twitter and have met a ton of smart people who I now count as friends (or collegues). I check in to FriendFeed, I look at the other services I’m on - but those are appointment check-ins, not integrated into my daily workflow.

In fact - I still can’t get excited about Plurk - and I know plenty of people who are. I just can’t get past the interface (again, my issue!) and the whole karma point system makes no sense to me. Many of my connections love it and I plan on checking in every once in a while - it’s just not for me. On the other hand, I’m enjoying Posterous and the simplicity of emailing all of my updates, pictures, etc. It’s easy and fast.

Do the Twitter down times disturb me? More of a gentle to general state of annoyance. Do I wish they would set their business model? Uh, yeah (I’m sure they can’t wait to do that too). But I love the service and the team - both of which have changed the daily way I communicate with the world. And have brought me opportunities and people in my life that I would have never had before Twitter.

(And BTW - it’s still FREE!).

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With all of the up and down (time) of Twitter, many people are looking at alternatives for their microblogging platform of choice. Tonight I noticed (ironically through Twitter) a number of my friends trying out Plurk.

My Plurk Page

Plurk has a very visual timeline that also tracks the comments in real time (the unread comments show up in your browser tab in FireFox). Right now, there’s no way to differentiate comments to your plurks or your friends without actually clicking on the “Show all” link.

They also track interaction by awarding karma points (from the website):

“Every plurker has his/her own karma value. It is recalculated every day and falls within these intervals:

• 0.00 to 21.00: You are in the state of creation
• 21.00 to 41.00: You are in the state of maintenance
• 41.00 to 61.00: You are enlightened
• 61.00 to 81.00: You are so close to Plurk Nirvana
• 81.00 to 100.00: You have reached Plurk Nirvana!

Your karma score is directly influenced by your and your friends Plurk activity. The more active you are, the more points you’ll get. Using various features of Plurk such as instant messaging or uploading a profile image will also help.

Invite your real friends to boost your karma!”

It’s weird that you can’t fill out your profile with a description (250 characters) without reaching 40 karma points.

There are growing pains - I’ve already gotten a couple of database errors and I was unable to use any of the “Find a Friend” tools. But there are a couple of things I like - the “Alert” feature makes it easy to see who friends you (or accepted your requests) and there’s a group feature - “Cliques” - which has always been a missing Twitter feature for me.

It’s fun to try out, but the true test is how easily it folds into my workflow. I do like that Plurk is supported by Profilactic (which feeds my Lifestream page) and a number of people that I follow are already trying it out. As the service (and my use of it) grows, I’ll post my updated impressions.

Please feel free to friend me on Plurk.

UPDATE: Interesting Reading:

Plurk: Our Philosophy in a Walnut Shell

Sean Percival - Plurk: Timeline Based Microblogging

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