The new kid on the SMS sized blogging town is Plurk. It uses the tested and true recipe for web 2.0 success these days, tons of AJAX everywhere with a pastel color scheme and several messaging interfaces.

But one thing is sure, Plurk isn’t Twitter or Jaiku. Plurk is quite different in fact. What has struck most people is the beheaded dog logo. Which isn’t a logo at all, but only a status ranking badge.

Every plurk user has a karma rating, which is based on your activity and popularity on the site. The background logo is associated to the Karma state in which the user is. There are several ranks based on karma, only the lowest state, called the "state of creation" will display the headless dog.

Here are two pictures of other Karma states:

As of the time of this writing some Plurk functions are down due to the mass influx of people which was specially accelerated by Twitter being down again.

Another striking difference between Plurk and it’s competitors is it’s timeline. Instead of a good old vertical timeline we see a chronological side oriented timeline. I have some reserves on how will this work when users like Robert Scoble joins Plurk and starts adding everyone under the sky.

Plurk also relies on a action based action messaging. It reminds me of /me command in IRC or Twitstori. As I said a couple of days ago, the market is ready to see a new killer webapp on the social messaging/microblogging country.

I’ve been developing some twitter apps for the last couple of months. Which is a lousy excuse for letting this blog gain spider webs.
I’ve managed to get access to the public timeline via jabber and was delighted to work with so many skilled developers and build some quite successful apps.

But for the last weeks Twitter started to fail consistently. Downtime became a major factor and to avoid downtime Twitter decided to cut down some services.

One of the services that are now on hold are IM updates. This is the core of third party twitter apps, and all of them are out in the dark. Sure they could resort to scraping the public timeline RSS feed, but that will only cover around 85% of the updates, which for some may be enough to keep their sites running.

Some people are starting to turn to jaiku. Which in turn is being “invaded” by Brazilians, much like to what happened in earlier orkut years.

Right now the social microblogging market is ripe for a new major player to appear and steal the show. I’m sure both Microsoft and Yahoo have been watching this market. Both have IM clients that could easily integrate to a web microblogging platform.
Yahoo also has flickr which already works well with mobile tech and mobile picture uploading.

One thing is for sure, I wont be “wasting” so much time coding twitter apps soon.

I think it’s safe to assume that a marriage proposal is serious business and most couples embrace in the sometimes awkward ritual of popping the question while facing each other.

Technology has introduced several new ways to propose to your loved one, and all over the world there has been marriage proposals using phones, e-mail and even text messages.

I’m quite amazed that it took this long for a marriage proposal to take place on twitter, but yesterday Max Kiesler proposed to Emily Chang after apparently living together for fifteen years. And the Twitter community cheered when she said yes.

Congratulations to both of them in this new stage of their lives.

This is just a quick post about the breakout of the first twitter war. It’s a friendly and colorful war in which each twitter user can participate by following one team. Most teams are using color names, but there are already sightings of other kinds of teams.

The idea is to see which color has more followers. But there’s some discussion on how to make things more fun. Corvida at Shegeeks is trying to keep count on things but it’s not that simple since anyone can join multiple teams or create their own team.

Being Portuguese I’ve joined greenredteam. Have fun, come join the twitter color war.

I’ve been having some fun with Yahoo Live for some time now. We’ve all heard about the technical problems that have plagued the service since it’s beginning a couple of months back, but I’ve enjoyed watching anonymous people playing guitar or displaying their DJ skills for a couple of friends and casual spectators.

I’ve subscribed to Yahoo Live twitter user, and i get occasional announcements of stuff going on in Live. I was quite surprised to see that there was a town hall being held. An actual Town Hall, from a small city in Spain called Jun, with an actual mayor, talking to actual people concerned about their town needs.

I caught the event early on and was able to talk to mayor José Salas about this, and he was quite happy to explain to me that he’s been doing this sort of stuff for some years now. Jun is known for having an Internet friendly stance, being regarded by the European Community as the birth place of the active teledemocracy.

These are the things that make the endless hours of roaming through the web worthwhile. If you hurry up you can still catch the event live at http://live.yahoo.com/alcaldejun. You can also check the Mayor’s blog for the next event.

In the latter days of the Web 2.0 the new trend is to make new web sites invite only, for what’s called a private beta. Like many out there i fancy a invite only thing, it makes me feel special and unique.

So when i read about invites to a new thing called Blippr i didn’t think twice, and believe me, I’ve received invites to services that I’ll never use. It was in that mind set that I’ve arrived at blippr website, knowing absolutely nothing about it.

After the registration, i start tinkering with it, trying to understand what the site was all about, and I was in for a surprise.

A good surprise at that, Blippr takes the 160 characters rule that exist in Twitter and Jaiku to a new height, by limiting most interactions to that amount of text. At it’s heart it’s a social network devoted to comments on movies, books, music and more.

It takes a bit of Wikipedia, by allowing the user to create a new blip for a movie that isn’t already listed on the website. It then searches for information on the web about the movie title you’ve just entered filling in automatically most information about the movie. I’m referring to movies, but the same can be done for books, music, etc.

It also takes a bit of inspiration on Digg, by allowing the user not only to comment on your blip, but to agree or disagree with it, much in the way of a thumbs up, thumbs down thing.

The site is slick and clean, the potential is huge, the approach is simple. I think we have a winner here. I’ll be using blippr from now on, if you care to get in touch just visit my profile at http://www.blippr.com/profiles/438.

As i said in the beginning Blippr is still in private beta, but you can ask for an invitation at their website, and you’ll probably get one in a couple of hours, so go ahead and try for yourself.

As I type these words lots and lots of websites are experiencing all kinds of problems and difficulties. This is simply due to a problem at Amazon S3 cluster.

Skype has crashed and stopped responding, Twitter, Tumblr and other major websites are barely working, most aren’t displaying images, widgets or static material that was outsourced to Amazon S3 services.

It’s kinda funny how this goes against the very nature of the web, in each networks are interconnected in several ways to ensure that a major breakdown won’t happen.

One of the first lessons you’ll learn on most basic business management courses or books is that centralization is a bad thing, specially when the tasks being centralized are business critical.

But that goes against human nature. Humans tend to like stuff piled up and organized in large containers, that’s why IKEA furniture is such a success. Even tetris was such a smashing hit due to this very basic need in every person to organize stuff that is scattered around.

Amazon S3 services exist just for that, to accommodate huge amounts of data in a big, out of sight container that it’s easy to manage and cheap. But when that container is locked, and our stuff is locked inside things don’t look so bright anymore.

At this point there’s no explanation to what or why this is happening, but the tech web is bubbling about it’s new found dependency on Amazon and it’s dangers.

At this time the only bit of news from Amazon is that they are aware of the problem and are investigating the issue.

Google and Twitter joined forces to create a geographical based mashup using certain keywords related to Super Tuesday voting.
The app itself is nothing new or fancy, it just used the location field from the twitter user that happens to make some comment about politics and places it on Google Map on the appropriate spot in the world.

Twittervision has the same functionality for twitter’s public timeline and is a popular twitter app for quite some time now.
Politweets has been around for a while and deals exclusively with political chatter on twitter.

What strikes me as odd is why hasn’t Google used it’s recent acquisition Jaiku for this? It definitely would be a small push to revive the dying microblogging platform.

Jaiku users are fleeing in droves to Twitter, mostly due to the lack of activity but some are just seeing their hopes in Google turning Jaiku into a viable Twitter competitor fading to dust.

Is this the final nail in Jaiku’s coffin? Leave your comments

It went under the radar of most people and tech bloggers, but this ground breaking stuff from the micro-blogging giant Twitter.

A few days ago Starling the messaging queue platform used by Twitter has been released to the open source community to tinker with.
According to Alex Payne in the brand new Twitter Technology Blog:

Starling is at the core of what we do at Twitter; it moves small messages around to daemons that work on jobs like processing updates, delivering messages, archiving user accounts, and so forth.

Until now, Starling has lived a sheltered life in the Twitter code base. We’re happy to announce that Starling is now open source and freely available for anyone to use, modify, and improve. We’re eager to see patches and to start a proper open source community around Starling.

This is a bold move, and I agree with Jesse Stay when he compares Twitter to an early Google.

Any developer can now improve on Twitter’s work, possibly making for a better and faster service. I don’t believe that with this release there will be a swarm of Twitter clones popping all over the web, mainly because the costs of supporting tens of thousands of SMS are pretty steep and also because it’s not a simple service to monetize.

Twitter has the micro blogging and virtual presence market cornered, and while it isn’t a monopoly there isn’t much in the way of competition. Jaiku is still light years away and Google hasn’t yet done anything to cover the ground gained by Twitter.