My Own Story (so far) of Twitter (and Plurk)

I signed up back in August 2006 and according to that history page, Twitter.com went public on July 2006. Back then, the web was awash with debates about the relevance of a site like Twitter. I was on the side of those who thought that Twitter was absurd. I’m a blogger so naturally, posting in bursts of 140-character “tweets” just didn’t appeal to me which is evident in my first few tweets.

In case you didn’t notice, those tweets were posted in 3 separate years!

And then I tweeted for quite a while starting May 2008.

It didn’t last long however. One day, the Plurk bug bit me so I stopped tweeting regularly and began plurking madly in July 2008. And I believe that this was around the time when Twitter started truly dominating the American internet users population. But I didn’t care. Not many Filipinos were tweeting and most are plurking so I just went with the flow. I also tried Jaiku and Pownce but never really got into actually using them.

I did tweet my trip to Davao and back to Manila. =)

And unfortunately, I don’t have the patience to keep on hitting that Next button in my Plurk mobile page so I can’t give you a screenshot of my first plurks. Twitter’s was easier to get with the “page” variable in their URL’s query string. Plurk just had to make it more difficult with this offset nonsense. Cue "fail whale.”

The one single thing that made me give Twitter a chance again was a desktop client called blu, formerly called chirp. I was really attracted by the eye-candy which I know is lame but hey! It really is a well-designed Adobe Air app and this thing got me tweeting again so be nice to it!

Anyway, I’ve tried tons of clients since and now use the fantastic DestroyTwitter which is just as pleasing to look at but kind of more powerful than blu.

Around May this year, I plurked that I would stop plurking and just tweet to death. Of course that didn’t really happen. I discovered Ping.fm and learned that I don’t really have to live a monogamous social microblogging life. And the rest as they say is history…

Let’s go back to Twitter’s history for a moment. There are a couple of interesting things there that I’d like to point out. Obama registered barely a year after the launch of Twitter. He really is into technology then. That’s cool.

Britney Spears got mentioned 3 times in that history tree. But not for the good reasons. This tweet on the right is during MTV’s VMA back in 2007 when she made that infamous performance of “Gimme More.” <_<

And of course, it also mentions Twitter’s own Y2K – the Twitpocalypse. DestroyTwitter unfortunately was affected by this BUT all is well now since the developer was cool enough to release a fix just a few moments later. (Nope. This is not a paid post for DestroyTwitter. How I wish it was though. LOL!)

I don’t know personally of any Pinoys who tweet and plurk at the same time. But I’ve decided to keep Plurk because of the fun factor and also for the reason that as of now, I think there are more average Filipinos in Plurk. Average, meaning non-techie or “masang Pinoy.” Those who still primarily use Friendster and Yahoo! Mail. I don’t have hard evidence to back this up though. It’s just purely based on my own observations.

Also, the two services aren’t exactly the same thing. Plurk is more like an open forum discussion. While in Twitter, the messages and replies you’d see is more tightly knit around those people you follow. So you see, it’s perfectly fine to tweet and then plurk too. ^_^

I don’t know if I’ll still be tweeting or plurking this time next year but as long as I find them useful, you can bet to see more tweets and plurks from me.

Credits:
twitlurk image by hotmilkgreentea
twitter icon by Randa Clay
plurk badge by Pat Law