Good Intentions

Like I mentioned previously, I tripped over a variety of social media tools yesterday–Plurk, Jaiku, HelloTxt, and I’ve already been using Twitter pretty extensively.

But does all of this lead to too much connectivity? Are we too plugged in?

As Danielle mentioned over in The Road to Waco, what happened to letter writing? Epistles! There was a whole novel form based on epistles back in the early days of the Union–the epistolary novel, 19th century brainchild for rich people who wanted to take their minds off how rich they were. The novel was a series of letters passed back and forth from the main characters, and that is how the action of the plot was driven forward.

I had a penpal back in third grade. It was a fun experience, and I’d like to try that again. Anyone know of any penpal sites?

I’ve been using Twitter now for quite some time, and while I do enjoy it, the interface leaves a little something to be desired: it’s clunky and doesn’t do much, really. That’s why I’ve been checking out Plurk, which adds some interesting features onto the model Twitter has already created.

Plurk adds a timeline view, which allows for more interactivity with the short messages themselves, and also each message creates a “thread” so that replies can be easily recalled. Plurk seems to lend itself more to group conversations, while Twitter allows for powerful one-on-one conversations to which outsiders can easily respond.

One of the downsides of Plurk, of course, is that I have only one friend currently, and no fans, while on Twitter I have something like 20 followers (a paltry sum, but I’m proud of it). What’s worse, it seems the user bases don’t intersect all that much, or at least they don’t yet.

What I WOULD like to see is some way to connect all of these services, so I can just use the “portal, and therefore interface, of my choice to communicated with multiple services. That would be quite neat.

There’s also this article which is very enlightening and speaks to the differences between the two.

I think each has its uses, and I will be using both now, I think. Of course, there’s also Jaiku, which is invite-only right now, and I hope to get an invite one of these days so I can check it out.

EDIT: Ack! I just found another, Brightkite. Invite-only as well.

EDIT DOS: I stumbled onto another service called HelloTxt. It lets you update all of your social media accounts at once. More info to follow?