About a month ago I participated in the first of a series of Twebinars put on by David Alston of Radian6 and hosted by Chris Brogan. It was entitled Game Changing Moves in Social Media and was in all reality a mashup of several different interviews and set pieces about how social media can be utilized to help organizations be successful. The idea was to present these interviews (with the occasional comment/question posed by Mr. Brogan during the video breaks) and have people discuss them in real time using Twitter. The result, in my opinion, disjointed at best.

Plurk Versus Twitter

The majority of the discussion was people talking about being in the Twebinar, and since most of it happened on Summize (which was recently purchased by Twitter) it was somewhat difficult to follow everything that was going on, especially if you were confined to a single monitor (fortunately I was not).

About a week ago I participated in a Plurkshop hosted by the aforementioned Mr. Alston on the upstart microblogging site Plurk. The subject of the Plurkshop was social media measurement. The Plurkshop went like this, David posed a question, anyone who wanted to respond did and it went from there. The result was disjointed, but not in a bad way. It was very enjoyable, although there are certain limitations in plurk that made the experience tedious at times (constant refreshing of the page for starters, the inability to post on plurkify (a portal site that does the refreshing for you, etc…). However, all in all, a lot of great ideas were exchanged and the conversation seemed far more focused than that of the Twebinar.

What does this mean? Well, for me, it means that I’ve been paying a lot more attention to Plurk than I used to (and thanks to Ping.fm, it’s not as hard as I thought it would have been). And I’ve noticed something, the Plurk community, while significantly smaller than that of Twitter, is full of really interesting people with a hell of a lot of great information to share, oh, and with a smaller community, it’s actually easier to converse with people. Many of the people that engage on Plurk are people that I have followed on Twitter for many, many months and were always hard to get a response from (not because they are rude or anything like that, but most likely due to the fact that having 10,000 plus followers mean there are a lot of @’s that go unread). Whereas on Plurk I have had discussions with Geoff Livingston, Mack Collier, David Alston, Amber Naslund, Scott Schablow, Tim Jackson and many others that would most likely not have happened on Twitter.

I can’t say whether Plurk will overtake Twitter (it would take quite a while, but it’s possible) or whether some other site like Kwippy will come along and knock them both out of the game, but I find myself paying far more attention to Plurk than to Twitter lately. Especially when it comes to discussion threading, Plurk has Twitter beat there, hands down.

As for me, I am really looking forward to my next Plurkshop (which will actually happen before this column is posted) and can’t even remember when the second Radian6 twebinar is happening (late July I think, but no specifics come to mind).

What do you think? Do you think Twitter can recover from it’s recent run of issues? Will their purchase of Summize really help to get them back on track, or, will Plurk (or another site) continue to pilfer users from Twitter?

Greg Hollingsworth is a marketer and blogger who also writes about politics on Devil’s In The Details.

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