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Is Plurk a Twitter-Killer?

[Updated with screencast.] If you’ve spent any time on Twitter lately (via Twhirl or any other client), you know that the service has been having growing pains. There is Pownce as an alternative, but for some unexplainable reason, it doesn’t appeal to me. Twitter seems “better” b/c of the well-utilized API and all the desktop/ browser clients. But what do you do if Twitter goes down? Or if the Twitter clients are not showing updates for 20-30 minutes, despite your setting of 3 minutes?

I’m not talking jumping ship, but there is Plurk – something numerous Twitterers have tweeted about. Maki of DoshDosh.com noted on Twitter that Plurk seems more friendly. Consider that as of this writing, he’s following over 900 people and has nearly 3800 followers. Yet, he says that he doesn’t get many responses on Twitter when he asks questions.


When I’m on Twitter, sometimes it does feel like a lot of people talking to themselves. However, I happen to have a number of Performancing Hive mates on Twitter, and often have short conversations with them, as well as with a few non-Hive twitterers. Still, Plurk’s threaded messages interface encourages response. So, probably, does the assignment of “karma” points, which you can acquire in a number of ways. And who doesn’t want to become a “top 10” member on a new social site? What’s more, you can set up “cliques” if you like.

In less than 12 hours, I’ve gained over 40 friends (some added me first) and 14.71 karma points – whatever that means. I also love the timeline view and the fact that you can very easily embed YouTube video or images from TinyPic, ImageShack, Flickr or Photobucket.

The only drawbacks I see for my continued use of Plurk (but not as a replacement to Twitter) are:

  1. No way to only see threaded responses for the Plurks you commented on only. It gets overwhelming to see “145 new responses”, or something of that sort, every few minutes – even when you cleared them all seconds ago.
  2. No API yet, so no alternate clients for Plurk msg consumption.
  3. Hangs my FF browser multiple times, but only I when I try to view “Alerts”. Not always, but when it happens, it’s because of that link. This could be due to some conflicting FF extension, but it’s annoying.
  4. It’s starting to hiccup already, at least as far as my Internet connection suggests.
  5. Is a huge time-waster, though that might be because I’m just getting used to it and spending way too much time. Still, a Twhirl-like desktop client might help in that regard – if they can figure out an ergonomic way to display threaded “responses”.

If you want a quick comparison, see LiveCrunch’s Plurk vs Twitter post. Also see Muhammad Saleem’s guest post about Plurk at Read/Write Web for a more indepth look. Muhammad thinks Plurk will be the next big lifestreaming service. I think that an API will make the difference.

Mistakes I Have Made Since Becoming A Pro Blogger

A Big Mistake

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted”—Italian Proverb

I’ve been a professional blogger for around two years now, and I got my big break at Mashable. I managed to make a name for myself within the short time I was there, but a lack of creative freedom to write about what I wanted lead me to not being as enthusiastic about my job as I once was. The money was great, but it wasn’t worth the cost of having to write about what others wanted me to write about while my ideas were shot down left and right. I have to express myself freely in order to work well.

Was leaving a mistake? Absolutely not! It lead to other opportunities which I enjoy including this Performancing job which I love. I also started a blog for the first time in nearly a year, OnlyJames—my personal blog.

There are, unfortunately, mistakes which I have made that have taken their toll. Each one is an experience that I had to learn from if I expected to progress as a professional blogger.

My Mistakes

Passing Up TV Time

Problem

G4TV—previously TechTV then G4TechTV—wanted me to appear on Attack of the Show—one of the most popular shows on G4TV—to do a 5 – 10 minute panel discussion with an editor from PC World or PC Magazine after I wrote an article about the potential death of Yahoo. Yes, it this is national television.

Sean O’Rourke, producer of Attack of the Show, sent me an email inquiring if I would be interested in taking part of the show:

James,

I am a producer with G4TV’s Attack of the Show. We came accross your article about the death of Yahoo yesterday as we were planning our story for today’s show. Today on our show we’re going to be having a panel discussion on this topic and I am wondering if you would like to participate? The segment is sort of like something you might see on a cable news show. It will be you and one other guest talking about the points regarding Yahoo.

You would come to a satellite location so you can be on our show.

Sorry for the speed of this email but the show is at 4PM PST. I need to book people quickly.

I, reluctantly, rejected this opportunity. It was more of a fear about making myself look like an idiot than anything. I was questioning myself, and I wasn’t very confident with what I would have done on the show. Everyone else said I should do it, but I was the only one that was not ready.

After watching “The Loop,”—the portion of the show I would have been on—it was beyond obvious that both of the panel members didn’t have much of a clue about what they were talking about. It almost felt like both panel members were reading from my article. I was almost ready to kick myself by realizing how simple it would have all been. I had an opportunity to make myself into some technology genius that has been on national television, but instead I am an idiot for not doing the show.

It was one of the more prevalent bonehead moves on my part, and if I don’t ever get the chance to go on television again, I will forever have this chip on my shoulder. I must hope that I write something so impressive again as to have a television network notice it. Can’t be too hard, right?

Solution

If given an opportunity that will be great, take it!

Not Backing Up Data

Problem

After joining Performancing, CirtexHosting decided it was time to delete my site and replace it with a backup copy around four months old. The problem was that they forgot to inform me of this before it happened, and a simple email could have saved plenty of people from headaches. As a result, I was not very happy when this happened.

All sites need to have backups just in case something like this happens, right? Well, I had an automated backup performed on a weekly basis, and, furthermore, I backed up the entire site manually at the end of the month. I figured this was enough, and I felt comfortable knowing that my host would backup my data on occasion—everything was supposed to be perfect!

I would quickly learn that my perfect world was ruined when the automated backups were failing on the attempted restores, and the manual backup revealed that many of my images were never actually being backed up for some reason or another.

The end result is a blog without hundreds of pictures, many articles, and my motivation to fix it. To make matters worse, I restored everything on a different content management system which makes it extremely difficult to go back to WordPress.

After consideration of how much effort it would require to get what I want out of the CMS I switched to, it is simply not worth it at this time, and I am still hesitant to go out and hire someone to design what I envision. The blog in question just sits as I try to think of what to do with it. I am not blessed with the skills of artistic design, and I don’t have much time to tinker with things.

This mistake could probably be explained in another way: maybe, just maybe, all I need to realize is that I got what I paid for. I got ripped off, but I did, in fact, receive what I paid for. I tried going to cheap route, and it came back to haunt me. It was a huge and costly mistake.

Solution

Always test backups and sign with a reliable hosting company.

Anti-Social

Problem

When I first started blogging professionally, I was not a very social person. This, of course, reflects my life outside of the internet as well as on it. Soon enough, with my desire to become a successful blogger, I started realizing that I would need to change if I was going to get anywhere in a realistic time-frame.

Blogging, from my perspective, is all about being social—you are communicating to people that read your content, but that isn’t good enough on its own. I was kidding myself by thinking I was social by simply writing on my blog. Only within this past year I began realizing the mistakes I was making. I needed to network myself more, but I wasn’t doing it correctly.

A lot of opportunities that could have been had when I first started blogging were lost as a result. I should have been more outgoing.

Now I talk to bloggers on a daily basis, and I am making new friends that are far more knowledgeable on the topics I write about. I’m learning from some of the best, and as my contacts grow, hopefully the opportunities will too.

Solution

Be more social—it can help create new relationships and opportunities throughout the blogosphere.

Mistakes Happen To Us All

Hopefully, reading about my mistakes as a blogger will help you to realize yours. Acknowledge them. These are not moments you dwell on, but, instead, you learn from them. Try your best to avoid making the same mistakes again.

I am interested in hearing about your biggest mistakes since becoming a blogger. Is there anything you wished you have done differently? Any opportunities that evaded you? Tell us about them in the comments section.

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[Image Credit: Your Choice – A 1970 Ford Pinto or 10 Piece Chicken Nuggets From Wendy’s?—Sister72 | CC]

Practical Blogging Tips: Focus on One Project at a Time

Even a hardcore multi-tasker like myself has to give in a bit after reading How to Turn Your Dream Projects Into Reality over at ProFreelancing. That post is from late March, but it is the best explanation I’ve read in a while for not doing a million things at once – such as creating multiple blogs all at the same time. It still doesn’t stop me from my style of multi-tasking, but it clarifies what I’ve recently concluded: build one blog at a time.

The serial approach is ideal for any projects that will be ongoing/ long-term. That’s especially true if you can get each project to a self-sustaining state. That is the true value of the serial approach to website portfolio building. Or you can do as I and other bloggers have done: set up multiple blogs at once and never have any of them go anywhere.

Document Collaboration in Real-Time with SubEthaEdit

Creating and editing documents has, understandably, been a fairly lonely task for bloggers. Fortunately, SubEthaEdit by The Coding Monkeys changes all that by giving users the power to collaborate instantaneously. Multiple people can create and edit content in real-time, and beyond being fun, it is extremely useful as well.

Recently, Macworld posted a video explaining the tools they use in their workflow, and the first tool they mentioned was SubEthaEdit. It came to my suprise to learn what was possible with SubEthaEdit—I already had the application installed, but I was unaware of the potential until after watching the video.

Only one thought came to mind—that’s freaking awesome!

The application has certainly been put to the test:

SubEthaEdit has been used to take notes together at conferences like O’Reilly’s OS X Conference, Open Source Convention, Emerging Technology Conference, PyCon, NECC, WWDC and Siggraph. With its new web page export feature you can store these notes with all collaborative metadata intact.

Still, we all must realize that doing anything over the internet in real-time is quite an achievement, but text editing has not received quite the attention it deserves. The question of whether or not there is a market for this right now is valid, and there are several technical challenges with real-time collaboration.

Regardless of the technical problems and awesomeness of it all, it doesn’t mean anything until you actually dig in and play. That is why I am here.

Review

Interface

SubEthaEdit Interface

First impressions of SubEthaEdit based on the interface were not promising. This was so true that I actually have had the application installed for two weeks. I only used it yesterday after learning about some of its more interesting functionality.

Essentially, SubEthaEdit is a barebones text editing client with the ability to select several types of formats for editing text. C++, AppleScript, HTML, Python, Javascript, and many other programming languages are available. So, if you are also a programmer, you might appreciate the interface more than I would. All of that aside, it is still perfectly fine for writers.

The interesting part of the entire interface is the document access area (also called the participants tab. Within this area, you will be notified of people that can connect to your document to modify it in real-time, but you will read more on that later.

There is not much in the way of text formatting. However, you can modify the text editing environment to take on different color schemes and text fonts, but beyond that, there is not much to the editing experience. It gets the job done, but there are better and more visually appealing editors available like TextWrangler.

Features

You don’t install SubEthaEdit purely for its text editing capabilities—you install SubEthaEdit for the real-time collaboration, and that is exactly what I am going to focus on here.

Let me answer the most obvious question first: how can more than one person possibly create/edit a document at the same time? Well, it isn’t as confusing as you would imagine. Editing can be done instantly, but you can lock out certain people from making changes to keep things simple. However, it never felt overwhelming, but I only had one other person to test it with.

SubEthaEdit always lets you know where your friend’s text caret is located at so the participants can avoid writing in the same area (unless you want to, which can be just as fun). It is quite fascinating to see where your co-editors will intend on writing, and you can also see when they highlight text.

When collaborating, all text is highlighted by default with a specified color which represents each person’s input within the document currently being edited. This is very nice for being able to tell which text has been modified by who. It also allows for corrections to stand out. Most of these features are customizable though, so if you prefer having only the text, it is only a few clicks away.

Regardless, it all comes down to the collaboration ability with SubEthaEdit, and this is the application to do that. It does it very well. Just make sure to save on occasion. I had an incident where I was writing a portion of this article and my girlfriend accidentally deleted the entire article. Thankfully, after restarting the document, I was able to restore the file I had saved earlier on. Other than that, everything was great.

Overall

SubEthaEdit will probably never have the lights shined upon it like Microsoft Word does, but this little application offers functionality that can’t be ignored or performed by competition. If you are working with a group of people and taking the work seriously, SubEthaEdit is an obvious investment.

In any other case, it is a fun application to try out with a few friends at least once. But $43.50 (considering exchange rates) is not worth it unless you are using it on a daily basis. There is a 30 day trial period.

Final Thoughts

I spent a few hours with my girlfriend playing with SubEthaEdit, and we had plenty of fun writing together in real-time. We used it more like a chat conversation than anything else, but I could definitely see the potential.

There are a few other projects that are attempting to do what SubEthaEdit has done. Gobby is the best competition available right now, but I have not tried it.

SubEthaEdit comes with a 30 day trial, and it can be downloaded here.

If you have any thoughts on live collaboration, please let them be known in the comments section. It is an exciting technology, but it still needs to be adopted by many users before developers will invest so much time trying to create this technology. Do you think you would use something like this in the future? Let everyone know!

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Convertico PNG And ICO File Converter

Convertico is a brand new online tool that enables you to convert ICO files to PNG files and vice versa. You can either link to the file in question and the online tool will convert the file in the background or you can choose to upload an image from your hard drive.

For this review, I submitted the link to my blogs header image which was a .png file. The converter took my large header image which was in png format and converted it to a tiny ICO file which I could then use as a favicon if I wanted to.

So if you’re in the need of an ICO image, this site is a quick and simple way of obtaining an ICO file from a PNG file.

HK Not The Domain To Buy

According to a report that is to be released on Wednesday by McAfee Inc, .hk or Hong Kong domains were found to be the most dangerous domains on the web out of a total of 9.9 million websites that were tested on 265 different domains. The domains were tested for serving malicious code, excessive pop-up ads or forms to fill out that actually are tools for harvesting e-mail addresses for sending spam.

Here some other stats that come straight out of the report.

  • 19.2 percent of .hk domains were found as dangerous
  • 11.8 percent of .cn or China domains were flagged as dangerous
  • 11.7 percent of .info sites were flagged as dangerous
  • 5 percent of .com sites were identified as dangerous
  • 6.8 percent of .ro (Romania) domains were flagged as dangerous
  • 6 percent of .ru (Russian) domains were flagged as dangerous

The report did not identify the domain registrars responsible for allowing these malicious domains to be registered.

I’ve personally noticed with my own blog that the majority of sploggers I see scraping my content are on .info domains. I’ve been told that .info domains are the cheapest ones to purchase at the moment which why they have become so popular amongst the malicious users. Every now and then, I’ve seen .cn domains ripping my content but they have been far and few between. Have you experienced something similar?

As for domains which had the least amount of dangerous sites attributed to them.

  • .gov (government use) 0.05 percent
  • .jp (japan) 0.1 percent flagged
  • .au (Austrailia) 0.3 percent flagged

Funny Headline Writing Contest

Perhaps the single most essential skill for online writing is the art of headline writing. Over at Glamorati, I’m co-sponsoring a headline writing contest in the month of June with a grand prize of $500. Plus, each published headline from all contestants will receive $5.

The basic idea of the contest is to re-write headlines for already existing stories, giving them a funny/witty/snarky/sarcastic flair.

For all the rules and details, go here.