k r i s a n d r o

Twitter on fire.

Twitter is seeing tremendous growth recently and it’s pretty evident that it has caught on as well on the local front. Twitter has evolved from a ’140 character or less’ status update tool to something of many uses, but there is one major usage of Twitter that I disagree with; Twitter as a tool for communication.

Threaded Plurks VS Non-Threaded Twits

Unless you are on replying to someone within a short instance upon receiving a tweet, there a high chance that your reply would make little sense to the recipient and even lesser sense to others. There is little chance for one to let’s say, reply to a tweet that is of 1 day old and still manage to have the conversation continued by a group of people who took part before. You cannot be also seen replying very often as your updates will flood up timelines of people who are following you. Other than people who tweet mundane stuffs, ‘noisy’ people are next on the list to be un-followed.

You won’t see the above happening on Twitter.

Plurk on the other hand has threaded comments and this ensures a higher chance of relevance, continuity and lifespan. Plurk threads have responses going up to 200 and seldom survive for more than 48 hours but it’s much better than Twitter. Twitter’s conversations rarely involve more than 2 users and hardly last more than a couple of hours. And the weird thing is, conversations usually get lesser as you have more friends on Twitter and conversations get more as you have more friends on Plurk.

Filtering Vast Amounts of Information

One other thing about Twitter being a bad tool for communication tool is that unless you are using a 3rd party software, there is no way of filtering the conversations that is happening unless you decide to un-follow the person/friend and thus ‘un-subscribing’ to all of his/her twits and run a chance of offending him/her.

Plurk has a function to mute each thread that is ongoing in your timeline and it serves as a great way to filter off conversations that you have no interest in. If you have a friend who is flooding your timeline and you don’t wish to un-friend him, you can simply un-follow his Plurks and he/she will be none the wiser (until he realize you stopped participating in his threads) as the both of you will still be registered as ‘friends’.

And So…

Twitter is an awesome platform of many uses and is a better choice to reach to the masses because of its immense popularity and very useful 3rd party applications. But if you are interested in building better relations through longer and continued conversations, Plurk is the better platform to engage in, despite failing to catch on as much as Twitter did so far.

I do have presences in both platforms and you guys can add me on Twitter and/or Plurk. Have fun!