@NowSourcing.Com

I remember when Plurk first came out.  At first glance its user interface was different but once you got to spending some time on the site, it was pretty cool.  As luck would have it, Plurk also came around when Twitter was having some of its worst downtime in history.  Take that, and some nifty enhanced features (conversations on one page, ability to share images and video, dancing bananas and it seemed as though Plurk really could have taken over the microblogging space.

But it didn’t.

Why? I would offer that Plurk ultimately didn’t listen to its community.  Perhaps the dealbreaker for me and others was the fact about not making karma optional.  The nature of many on the social web is to be competitive, and Plurk gave us a forum for this.  The more active you are, the more karma you received.  However, if there was a period of time that you were inactive (say, you had a holiday, a weekend, religious reasons, etc) you would actually lose karma.  A number of people brought this up, but Plurk stood firm, saying that if you didn’t want to see karma on your profile, you could just hide it out with a different page design.  That’s a band-aid to the problem.

I was thinking about keeping quiet over this situation, that is, until I received an email from Plurk last week talking about the Plurk activity I’ve missed for the week.  After seeing this, I chatted with Teeg, a friend of mine and still staunch supporter of Plurk.  She said that she didn’t get the email! This is a community fail on the part of Plurk to target the Plurkers that are not participating, rather than the ones that are.

So Plurk, I didn’t want to say it, but you’re doing it wrong:

Ever since being immersed in microblogging – Twitter and to a lesser extent Plurk – I’ve noticed that I have been blogging way too infrequently.  That’s just not fair to the readers.  While I may have a good Tweet or two, what’s the chance that you caught it? You are probably more likely going to regularly visit my blog or RSS feed of the blog to capture the latest news here. (Yes, I know you can subscribe to one’s Tweets, but who really wants all the noise?)

That said, I’m going to try a one post per day (not counting the weekend) pace for a while.  This will allow me to elaborate beyond the sometimes too brief 140 characters, yet get to the point of a daily piece of wisdom.

As I mentioned on the new Collective Thoughts Twitter account: expect more.

With me today is a popular former Digg user, Diggboss. Thanks for joining me, Diggboss. Ok, let’s get right into it:

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. When did you start getting into social media in the first place, and which network did you like the most from the start?

My scripts used Digg APIs. Anyone can use Digg APIs. Digg data is open under Creative Commons.

Absolutely not as I said anyone with a little knowledge of CURL or WGET can make use of the APIs and do what I did.

Digg is not FaceBook, coders please stay away from Digg. Digg does not have open policies and does not support coders. Every script is a BAD script. Digg uses its TOS to its advantage.

Haha, thats an outrageous question, nope, never.

9. So what’s next for Diggboss?

I am sure Digg would restore my account, I don’t have an alternative. I am banned.

I loved Digg and will continue to love it, my love for digg is not conditional.

[Special guest post for Friday fun from none other than my daughter. No, really.]

Everyone thinks their dad is weird. But I, on the other hand, know my dad is totally crazy. He does this thing called “Social Media” or whatever. I can’t even count the times that he’s tried to explain it to me. Don’t get me wrong, I mean my dad is amazingly cool. All the ridiculously hilarious (and usually meaningless) videos on YouTube that have come out within the last 30 seconds, he knows about and feels necessary to show me and tell me about it.

Back to this Social Media (or whatever) I’ve started to understand. Started. It’s a bit hard to grasp at first, that’s why I’m stuck writing about how I absolutely know nothing about anything, I mean writing about what my dad does and how he knows everything about everything. So all the time, I hear my dad talking about this thing called “Plurk” and “Mixx” and “Digg” and whenever he brings these things up, I suggest making a parody of them called “Crapp“. But that never really works out.

Basically what I know about his job is that he talks to a lot of people all over the world, makes websites cool and popular (relatively speaking) and gets paid for it. Seriously. I suppose their might be more to it, but with my youthful ignorance, I see this job as a cakewalk!

And so, one day, I decided I wanted to help…boy was that a good idea. Right now he’s clickin’ and clackin’ around on his laptop, no doubt reading over my shoulder in the office. And I’m just silently frustrated, wondering why my dad couldn’t have a scuba diving equipment store, or drive a boat or at least own NASA. But, no, he does the boring job. Which really isn’t so boring once you think about it.

If you too got fed up with the whale carrying birds, then you must have turned you attention and free time to another micro-blogging platform. First came Jaiku, then Pownce, after which people started turning to Twitter. When the whale failed ashore, we turned our attention to Plurk. Not a new player has come into the scene by the name of Identi.ca.

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