Twitter vs Friendfeed vs Plurk

Inspired by this Google Trends chart of Twitter v. Friendfeed posted by Ole Begemann I threw the new, horizontally dynamic visual timeline updating comment threading microblogging platform Plurk into the mix.

I tried Plurk a couple weeks back for a day. Returned on the following two days and have not returned since. There are way too many of these types of services and they don’t dynamically reflect and refract as they should. Same reason I latched onto FriendFeed as opposed to the — possibly more attractive and fun to use — SocialThing. But what IS interesting is that — according to Google Trends’ calculations, Plurk.. in only a few weeks… has set a higher trend base/level than Friendfeed — whether this is because friendfeed is widely accessed via third party apps such as Facebook, Twhirl, and AlertThingy, I’m not sure. But what is interesting is that it appears to be quite sticky and in Brazil and Taiwan is already out-“trending” Friendfeed.

It also must be said that one reason for the boost in Twitter’s visits is not necessarily a good reason — it’s suffered from frequent downtime and poor performance in recent months with daily outages and appearances of the “fail whale” becoming an expected part of the experience. Which apparently has developers on the run. But, alas, no news is bad news, right?

Just throwing these thoughts out there. I’m personally not a huge fan of Plurk (they encourage addictiveness by virally spreading “karma” and expressing “emo-ness” after all) and am not hyping it. I do think you can deduce that Plurk’s rate of adoption was likely hastened by its release soon after a relatively short pre-beta phase and it’s stable cache of unique features, not to mention decent uptime.

Still, I’m a Twitter guy all the way. I do think there will be a Twitter-killer someday, but it won’t be a “killer” it will be an open and malleable interface incorporating the best of all micro-blogging functions.