I have been a Twitter addict for about 14 months now and have been playing (lemming like) with other microblogging tools as they have come along been bought to my attention via Twitter.
Plurk was launched recently a few of my Twitter friends went over there so I went too- just to have a look at the shiny new toy.
The trouble was that not everyone did. While Twitter has had problems recently no-one quite wants to abandon it completely. These social network sites are all about the community. If your friends are not there they do not have much value. So the issue becomes how to keep up with those on Plurk and Twitter at the same time.
Plurk is great for conversations but at the moment it has no integration with other sites as Twitter does. It is not yet supported by Friendfeed and I couldn’t get Feeddemon to see the RSS feed – but that could be because I have a private feed.
Ping.fm is designed for those, like me, wanting sometimes to update their status on several sites at once eg Plurk, Twitter, Facebook. It offered a iGoogle gadget from their site so I added it to my iGoogle page and had a very convenient place to post status updates. I shut down Twitter etc when I don’t want distractions but I always have my homepage open.
Trouble happens when someone responds to the status change i.e. wants to start a conversation. Great but if you havent got the site open in your browser or desktop client (like Twirl) you will miss the response and the opportunity to connect. If you had those sites open you wouldn’t need Ping.fm in the first place. It all depends on how and why you are using these types of sites whether you will find Ping.fm useful.
Suelibrarian 