Just saw that Pownce will be closing up on December 15th. Half-twitter half-file sharing, the service had high hopes when it first started. Then it went nowhere fast.
I guess it was a good decision for me not to renew my “Pro” account when it expired earlier in the year.
According to the Pownce Blog, Pownce will be merged into into the Six Apart family in some form. We’ll see what happens in 2009… if anyone really cares.
I’ve been using Plurk for a while now, and have rather enjoyed it. This evening, I reached a major milestone on the service called “Nirvana”. One achieves this status when their karma rises above 81.00.
Karma is a highly debated subject among Plurk users right now. Some feel that it hurts the service, while others (me included) think that it helps promote interaction, discourages spamming, and ads some fun to it. I must say, compared to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, and the number of other similar services, I’ve used Plurk far more often.
What does it take to obtain the highest level of karma? Not much really… in fact, I would have been at Nirvana a lot sooner had I not had a 2 week break a few months ago due to vacation and crappy (no) Comcast service. See my karma trend.
Right now, my stats on Plurk are:
As you can see, while I’ve been fairly active, I’ve not really been that active. This brings to question, is Nirvana to easy to obtain? Ask anyone who has it, and I’m sure they’ll say it’s to hard to maintain.
Ok, so yesterday I wrote a message about Plurk. I must admit, after playing with it for a couple of days and communicating with my Neowin friends, I’ve become somewhat of an addict. For me, it has been so much better than my short run at Twitter (which I still update via ping.fm).
For those of you that have never used a service like Plurk or Twitter. They are often referred to as mico-blogs, to be honest, I hate that term. Think of it is a semi-live chat/form. You post something, and other people can reply. You can give a status update (i.e. d3bruts1d is off to take a nap), share videos and pictures, or have a conversation. – Unlike forums that are generally geared toward specific topics (Neowin, TR, OCC, etc.), these kinds of service are usually far more open. Allowing you to discuss your favorite foods, beer, movies, tv shows, talk tech, the weather, sports, or whatever floats you boat. And it’s fun, ask just about anyone that is plurking right now.
So, if you aren’t plurking yet. Go ahead and give it a try. Feel free to add ‘d3bruts1d’ to your friends list if you want someone to talk with. 
There has been some rumble the last few days about a new service called Plurk. I first noticed it when ping.fm did an update earlier this week and added support for it.
Plurk, like Twitter, is a micro-blog / status service. However rather than display things in a list view, Plurk uses a rather nice timeline view. This fresh approach, in addition to Twitters consistent stability issues has lead people to ask, could Plurk be a twitter killer?
My answer: Sure, it could be. But it still has a long way to go, and will need to offer several additional features. But so far, I’ve really liked it.
Of course, Plurk isn’t the fist service to be considered a “twitter killer”. Pownce and Jaiku as well as other services have all shared the same title. So far, nothing has really been able to touch the king of micro-blogging.
Part of what makes Twitter so unbeatable right now is the number of applications, plugins, and extensions that allow you to user Twitter. You’ll find something twitter related for Firefox, Flock, Google Desktop, iGoogle, Facebook, you can even find widgets that allow you to display your tweets on your personal blog. Not to mention the dozens of other sites out there that will aggregate your twitter data and display it.
What service does everyone else use? I’ve got friends on them all. So far my favorite is Plurk, followed by Ponce and Jaiku, with Twitter dead last.