Holiday Homework 2 : Microblogging-Is there life after Twitter?

Some time ago, I blogged about Why I still love Twitter .
Have things changed over the summer?

After trying the beta version of something called Kwippy , a message from a member of my Resources for Languages group reminded me of Plurk.

“Have you checked Plurk out? There is a nice group of educators on there…” and there is also a Diigo group for Pluking Eucators, created by Jo McLeay, a friendly teacher from Australia .

As Kwippy really had not convinced me that it had something different to offer from Twitter, I decided to have another look at Plurk and found that I could quite easily import my Twitter followers into Plurk. Easy, I thought-but what is the point? Funnily enough, I found that people had slightly different connections on Plurk and through the same “friends”, I often got to befriend different people.

When I started on Plurk, I asked straight away what was the difference with Twitter and I was directed to a number of bookmarks about this well-debated topic of conversation.

I like Plurk for its tidiness as it makes it easier to develop deeper professional conversations in it and in some ways to find out more about the people you befriend. However, I feel it can lack the spontaneity Twitter has and the fact that there are now so many tools to complement Twitter.

Twitter is messy, can be disorganised and unreliable but it does have that infectious energy that will be very hard to beat…