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!

It’s only two days away from Christmas, which also happens to be my birthday! Yes, I am a Christmas baby and Christmas was great until people around me realize that they should give me one birthday-cum-Christmas present instead of two separate gifts. One good thing that is still prevalent through these years is that it is so easy to remember my birthday; Kris is born on Christmas day! How hard is that? If you don’t remember my birthday, SHAME ON YOU!!! Go repent and get me a big gift! (Or make it two… )

SUBTLE HINT: iwantanipodtouch16GBthankyouverymuch

As much as I would like to believe that I am 18 years of age, I am actually turning 27 on Christmas and that thought is quite scary! I am actually inching towards the big 30 soon! And I can actually feel the age catching up on me; friends of the same age/batch getting married, more wrinkles, deteriorating stamina and most of all, the increasing hunger for a superpower to turn back time. That and X-ray vision. Heheheheheheheeee.

Despite the fallbacks that come of age, I think I am still happy with the past year. I made a lot of friends through the revival of blogging in February and through channels and platforms like wholivesnearyou.com, ping.sg, twitter, yebber, facebook & plurk. Being so active in the social media scene also gave me opportunities to attend various events that added colors to an otherwise mundane life. Most of all, thanks to Ruifang aka KuKuNehNeh aka KKNN aka the gf, for contributing the most joy for the past year.

Merry KRISmas and a Happy New Year everyone!

I have been wanting to take part in a full marathon since 2003-2004 and if I wrote it on a piece of paper as a thing-to-do, the paper will probably be yellow with the faded words barely recognizable.

In order to motivate myself, I gathered people over at plurk to find people who will be crazy enough to train for the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009. Besides the advantage of staying fit while training for such a gruelling run, I decided that the group should adopt a charity as well to give a greater cause. So the group “FortyTwoPointOneNineFive” was formed.

“We are a group of people who wants to complete a full marathon (42.195 km) at least once in our lives. Instead of procrastinating like we have always been doing, we decided to form a running group to challenge the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009!

We will most likely have a group effort to raise funds for charity as well to make this even more meaningful. Stayed tuned for more info!

Join us as we push each other to train for the gruelling run!”

Since most of us are very active online, I think it will be quite interesting to find ways to raise money and awareness for the adopted charity. If you are interested in joining us to train for the Standard Chartered Singapore Marathon 2009, do join us on facebook and also on our group at mapmyrun.com (A great way to log your runs and monitor your progress!) Since we live all over the island, we are using mapmyrun to log and monitor each other and will only meet for runs bi-weekly or monthly.

As you can see, we haven't really started and I am 2nd on the list with only 2.36km clocked. WAHAHAHAHA!

For the uninitiated, Plurk is a social medial tool and used for micro-blogging whereby one sends updates in 140 characters or less to the service. Plurk is very active in the local scene and most of the social media lovers are using Plurk very frequently to take part in various discussions, ranging from how great the Obama win was, to how lovely it is to take a dump in the toilet. Whatever the topics might be, Plurk is a great way to share and communicate.

We now have a Plurk: Singapore Facebook Group and had two ‘official’ gatherings so far with the last one at SMU’s Ice Cold Beer. A total of 17,352,451,726 30+ people turned up! We had loads of fun playing bar games with each other and laughing at a couple of people that totally sucked in certain games. It may sound evil that we laugh at them so openly but they are all alive so far and are looking forward to the next gathering that I was volunteered to organize. =P

Group shot at Plurk Gathering v2 – Thanks to Willy and David of Live! Studios for most of the photos that night!

I enjoyed myself thoroughly at the outing and it’s always great to put faces to the names/nicknames that I talk to so frequently online.

Join me on Plurk!

Blog posts about the gathering so far:

Wenderella

Clauds

Claudia

Cloudi3

Limetouch

iammyy