With a lot of focus on social media sites these days one of the biggest newcomers that is becoming more and more popular is Twitter.
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter web site, via the Twitter web site, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twhirl or Facebook.
Twitter has gained popularity in the bloggersphere thanks to several high profile bloggers like Leo Laporte, Robert Scoble and Chris Pirillo. Each of these bloggers has over 10,000 people following their updates on the site. Unfortunately for Twitter their new found popularity has not been without problems. The service regularly struggles, goes offline and features get disabled. The backend has not been able to scale as much as the company had liked. TechCrunch used to post about these weekly but got bored of keeping everyone up to date once the company decided to open a status page for the problems.
Recently a new service popped up which is now taking the focus of the blogosphere, Plurk. Plurk is funded, based in Ontario, Canada, and has a team of seven people working on it at the moment, so you could call it a small company right now.
Plurk takes the Twitter idea of short updates and builds on it with better visual elements (a neat timeline) and many more features. The service seems fast, smart and has a great UI. Whether it can scale well remains to be seen but recently there has been a lot more signing up for Plurk and it has handled the increase well.
The question remains is Plurk a Twitter killer? If it gets the same kind of attention that Twitter has then it certainly has the ability to. The company needs to build a good API and allow for external sites to grab the data and then it will be in a position to truly rival twitter. What do you guys think, do you prefer plurking or twittering?