How I Use Microblogs

Microblogs are quite the rage nowadays. You can just log in, post a short message, and then go ahead with your life. No need to write long articles, nothing that requires long reading, just a quick thought. With the 150 characters allowed for every post, it's short enough to fit in a basic SMS message! No wonder they have mobile versions of these available.

Short these posts may be, they still provide meaningful information for their users. I, for one, find these services indispensable. I've signed up for three of them, Tumblr, Twitter, and Plurk. Given three sources of information, how do I manage to post on three microblogs, you may ask. Let's see what kind of information I get from the three.

Twitter

This is the first among the three that I have subscribed to. I remember hearing about it on Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech (TWIT) Podcast (there was a time when they were fighting over the "twit" name).

A lot of popular personalities have signed up here. NBA players (CP3, Shaq, Mo Wiliams, Carmelo Anthony), TV/Media people (Ashton Kutcher), News companies (NY Times, CNN), and Web Personalities (Chris Pirillo, Veronica Belmont) are among the most followed. Topics range from personal notes and links to news articles to product reviews.

Similar to the diverse user set that Twitter has is the myriad of Twitter clients available for use in different platforms. TweetDeck and Twitteriffic is most popular for the desktop. Clients are also available for PDAs and mobile phones. Have I mentioned that you can also receive Twitter messages to your mobile phone?

Plurk

While Twittering, I learned about this about a year ago, and signed up as well. What's different here is that the posts are threaded -- replies to your Plurk messages appear in line with the original post. One more thing that's different, if not disorienting, is the side-scrolling timeline. Latest Plurks appear on the leftmost side, while the older ones get shifted towards the right. You can post pictures and videos as links, and Plurk shows a thumbnail of it. Plurk also has this karma system that goes up whenever you visit and post messages at the site often, and decreases it when you post and visit less.

Local people abound here in Plurk. I can say that 90% of all Plurk friends in my list are Filipinos. Everyday banter is what I encounter here. People talk about what breakfast they had for the day, how bad traffic is on a certain part of the city, who's cooking what, mall sales, etc. I read about what's happening around the city first on Plurk, even before it is shown on local TV or reported on radio.

No 'proper' Plurk client is available. There are stand-alone applications, but they only feed the data from m.plurk.com, the mobile version for Plurk.

Tumblr

Tumblr is yet another microblogging site. It took advantage of what Twitter lacks -- the ability to post information that is non-text. People can post photos and videos here. You can change the theme drastically, just like you would do a regular blog. So people who post mostly pictures can use a theme that would look like a photoblog that shows one post per page, while people who post messages and links can opt to use one of the default themes.

I don't really follow a lot of users here at Tumblr. I only use the service to store links to things that I find around the web. Whenever I need a link to something that I have encountered in the past, I go over to my tumblr site.

Which One For What?

If you would observe, I use each service because of the specific information that I get. I go to Twitter to get news from around the world, technology trends, and product reviews. I go to Plurk to know what's happening around the city (which is pretty helpful when typhoon Ondoy was ravaging the country). I go to Plurk to get links to sites I've previously been to.

It may sound too much of one thing, but in reality, subscribing to several microblogging sites gives me access to a lot of information, whether locally or internationally.