Blogging has changed the Internet forever, but there are people who aren’t necessarily willing to jump on the blogging bandwagon. While they may enjoy reading blogs, the possibility of them creating their own is very slim. For many people, writing a blog is an intimidating venture. They may feel like their written thoughts have to be complete, original, and lengthy in order for them to be worthy of publishing, and services like Twitter have been designed to help solve this problem. Instead of writing down every detail about something, you can send quick messages about what you’re doing and what you’re thinking to a number of people at once. Twitter is just one microblogging solution, and if you’d like to try an alternative, then check out Plurk. 

If you’re already familiar with Twitter, then the feature set of Plurk is going to make a lot of sense to you. The most interesting thing about the service to me is the timeline because it provides a new way to visualize the messages. Even though it may be a new way, I’m not convinced that it’s the best way. Some of you will probably prefer the timeline view, but it’s too much information for me, and I still like the old-fashioned list view. Of course, if Plurk can be reliable, then that may be enough to convince people to leave Twitter.