Twitter, Plurk and FriendFeed as discussion tools.

Fol­low­ing up from my pre­vi­ous post on Con­ver­sa­tion vs Noise. This is about car­ry­ing out dis­cus­sions, this is not about status updates like “I just had baked beans on toast for din­ner”, nor is it about the reli­ab­il­ity of the ser­vice (given Twiiter&#8217s recent prob­lems). This is purely about using the ser­vice to carry out con­ver­sa­tions with intel­li­gent people, yes there are people like that on the internet.

Twitter

You only carry out con­ver­sa­tions, with your friends. If one of your friends replies and on of their friends (but not one of your friends) joins the dis­cus­sion, you miss part of the con­ver­sa­tion and it becomes frac­tured. The only way to stay on top of this, is if good Twit­ter etiquette occur with lots of @ and you fol­low this up adding new people as friends.

This a great way of find­ing friends with sim­ilar interests, but it can be a lot of work. And once you start fol­low­ing people this gen­er­ates a great deal of noise. Par­tic­u­larly when your friends are talk­ing to their friends who are not your friends.

Another one of the dis­ad­vant­ages of twit­ter, depend­ing on your num­ber of friends, that unless con­ver­sa­tions are tagged with #some­thing, it is dif­fi­cult to fol­low con­ver­sa­tions and if you leave even for short period of time, you are lost.

Plurk

If you start the con­ver­sa­tion it is car­ried out with your friends, if some­body else starts, you are part of a dis­cus­sion with their friends, which may or may not be your friends. If you want your all friends involved, you either start the con­ver­sa­tion again with them or con­vince them to become friends of the other friend.

The big advant­age of Plurk is that con­ver­sa­tions are threaded, you can go have lunch come back and get right back into the conversation.

FriendFeed

You start a con­ver­sa­tion, if a friend joins it, it becomes avail­able to their friends. If friends of friends join in, then it becomes avail­able to their friends. So if you start a truly enga­ging con­ver­sa­tion it wil expand well bey­ond your circle of friends. The down­side is there is a lot of noise,

The con­ver­sa­tion is threaded, so you can leave for a short period of time, you do not miss anything.

What I do

So what do I with 190 Twit­ter friends, 55 Plurk friends and 45 friends on Friend­Feed. I used Twhirl to con­nect to Twit­ter and Friend­Feed and keep it open, when I am on the com­puter which is most of the day every day. I will visit Plurk site a few times a day, more often if there is an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion, less if I am busy. Other social net­work­ing ser­vices, I am lucky to vist once a day.

The future

Per­son­ally, I do know who much longer I will keep­ing using Plurk. It is a good ser­vice to carry out con­ver­sa­tions with a closed group of friends. The lack of a desktop applic­a­tion is hurt­ing, as does not know­ing if you are talk­ing to your all friends when you com­ment on another friend#&8217;s post.

Twit­ter, I will keep using even given the recent prob­lems. I have close to 200 friends and find it a great ser­vice to exchange small pieces of information.

Friend­Feed, I am find­ing this ser­vice more and more use­ful, both for con­ver­sa­tion and inform­a­tion dis­cov­ery and it appears to be evolving. The desktop apps and there are num­ber of them and the abil­ity to hide con­ver­sa­tions or ser­vices (only on the FF web­site) make Friend­Feed so usable.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2008 at 12:30 am and is filed under blogging, Just geek . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.