Do you Tweet? Can you Plurk?

No, I’m not speaking gobbledy gook, I’m talking about what’s got the lazy blogger in me, er, a-twitter once again: micro-blogging and social networking mashed into one, thanks at first to Twitter.com and, now, Plurk.com, which is my latest online addiction, and which has provided me endless moments of fun while working on the side. Wait, that doesn’t sound right. I work and plurk on the side. Right.

Eons ago, when blogging meant you had to painstakingly encode entries in basic html or manually create a new page per entry with the “site builders” on free sites like Homestead and Geocities, I was already wishing for a way to have an easily manageable small space for quickie updates. Flash forward a few years later, and I found Blogdrive.com and Blogspot.com. The basic html I’d labored so hard to learn came in handy—except when it came to that mini-blog feature I so coveted.

I logged in serious Internet hours, blog-hopping until my search led me to Sideblog.com. Unfortunately, that happiness was limited and short-lived. First of all, you had to log in to Sideblog.com, which wasn’t any easier than logging in to Blogspot.com, to post a quickie post, and I could never figure out how to make the time reflect Manila time. Second of all, Sideblog was a side project of its creator, and I think he wasn’t all that interested in his concept after all—which was a pity, because SMS soon gained popularity and while WAP blogging didn’t quite catch up, this technology changed the face of side- now micro-blogging.

I’m a late adapter to Twitter, having signed up only a couple of weeks ago, when it was already very popular. With Twitter, you can post or text 140-character entries in answer to the question “What are you doing?” and share it with other people. Simple enough. It doesn’t sound so important at first—and I didn’t see any value in it at the beginning too—but then I soon found out that, with user-created widgets and what-have-yous, it was useful for the exact function I wanted when I first decided to create my own online space: it was also a micro-blog perfect for those one-line entries I used to make. And people were commenting, to boot!

Faster than you could say “twitter, schmitter” I had an RSS feed of my latest five tweets (that’s what they call the posts) on Blogspot, a widget each on my Multiply and Friendster accounts, another widget for my Windows Vista Sidebar, a Firefox add-on, and an application on Facebook. How’s that for keeping everyone updated? Yet, I wasn’t quite good at connecting with the other Twitter users. In fact, I found it cumbersome to have to catch up with all the tweets and send comments to people, even if I was thrilled at being in the know. I became a Twitter lurker. It wasn’t long before I’d become a Plurker.

Enter Plurk.com, which, ironically enough, I found out about through the blog of a friend I helped start a blog. Plurk is this colorful, quirky micro-blogging service that has more of its users engaged. Unlike Twitter, which can be one long stream of tweets at one go, requiring you to sift endlessly through the exchanges, Plurk provides a brightly-colored timeline with changeable interfaces. In fact, that’s what it looks like, if you check out all your contacts’ plurks (yes, that’s what they call posts): a timeline that instantly arranges all the plurks in chronological order. Not only do you answer the question “What are you doing?”, you can also say, give, share, think, ask, love, wish—in fact, do whatever you want. People can comment easily too, with a nifty little drop down menu.

Plurk is all of everything combined: email, social networking, instant messaging, blogging and a little bit of gaming. To explain that last bit, the more active a Plurker you are, the more points, called Karma, you gain, and the more Plurk features get unlocked for you. So far, I’m up 26.03 points after three or so days of joining.

It’s a lot of fun too, because I’ve managed to convince old university friends to sign up, and now I have twenty or so Plurkers on my contact list. It feels like I’m scribbling away on my college logbook once again. I have to say it does keep me in touch with friends.

What’s even lovelier is that while I can’t seem to find Plurk widgets apart from what Plurk already offers, I’ve found an extremely user-friendly Firefox add-on for Plurk. That way, I get to plurk while I work on the side. I mean, I get to work and plurk on the side. Right.

Email your comments to [email protected]. You can also visit my personal blog at http://althearicardo.blogspot.com. You can text your comments again to (63)917-9164421.