A funny thing happened on the way to Plurk
About six weeks ago, the Twitter failwhale raised it’s ugly head and like many of my twitter friends headed off to look at alternatives, the two new kids on the block that week where Plurk and FriendFeed. Over 50 of my twitter friends joined both Plurk and FriendFeed.
Most of my twitter friends only had a brief encounter with FriendFeed, before heading over to Plurk, where a few have become regular users. From what I can gather most of my twitter friends found it difficult to locate their friends on FriendFeed, this was before Better FriendFeed recommended script appeared and you had to rely on the limited tools available on FriendFeed of importing friends from Twitter with the same username. It was easier to get accquire friends from friends in Plurk than FriendFeed.
Instead I stuck round FriendFeed, made use of the of the recommended friends which was promoting A-list blogger and found some new friends, or rather interesting people who talked about subjects that interested me.
So now I have two distinct social networks, Twitter based around people I know and have met, with a number of friends of friends and few interesting people I have not met. FriendFeed is mainly interesting people I have not met and a few friends from Twiiter who made the jump.
What have I learnt from this experience
If you are creating a social network:
- Your best chance of keeping users past the initial exploration phase, you need to make it easy to import your friends from other networks and also make it easy to acquire friends from friends.
- If you can not do that, make sure they can find interesting people. Because a few people might stick around and might even bring a few people back
If you are a user investigating a new social network and can not find your usual friends, why not explore and find some interesting people, you might be surprised what the rewards will be.