Brendan Young Blag » social networking

Microsoft China rips off Plurk

Brendan — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 16:24:52 +0000

About a year ago before I started using Twitter, I used a pretty neat service called Plurk. It’s similar to Twitter in that you send out a small update about yourself and people who are following you can see it, but Plurk does it with a clever charming horizontal scrolling layout. Eventually everyone in my “internet crowd” made the move to Twitter, so I followed suite.

Jump to today, or yesterday rather. I stumbled upon this article from Plurk’s blog: http://blog.plurk.com/2009/12/14/microsoft-rips-plurk/. Basically, Microsoft China made their own version of Plurk, going as far as to copy Plurk’s layout and change some colors, steal Plurk’s code, change some function names and add some soft returns.

That’s pretty low, Microsoft China.

I’m posting this to help get the word out. If you use Plurk or just want to spread the word, I suggest sending the above article to people you know who would be interested.

Tumblingr. Tumblring? Tumblring.

Brendan — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:04:02 +0000

I heard about Tumblr a long time ago, but for some reason it didn’t seem as appealing as it does now.

If you haven’t heard of it, its basically a blog site like Wordpress or Blogger but instead of just making posts, you choose from six different kind of posts: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, and Audio. I think it’s a pretty neat idea, but I’m not sure if I should use it since I have a blag already. I might use it if I think of an idea for a second blog.

I’m trying it out here.

Also: There’s a really cool Tumblr iPhone app that can use the camera and microphone to make Photo and Audio posts, so that’s pretty neat.

My Music, Wordle’d

Brendan — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:55:02 +0000

I tried out Last.fm’s Boffin at iamthejeff’s suggestion, and I got some cool results:

This isn’t even its primary function. You should try it out.

Brightkite Spite

Brendan — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 23:53:31 +0000

The other day I found this really neat “location-based” social network called Brightkite. It lets you see what your friends are up to in real time via twitter-like posts and pictures, but also displays your current location at the time of the post. It works best with a GPS device like an iPhone, but they say it works on any phone. They have a free iPhone app that I tried out on my iPod touch which is pretty snazzy. Of course, I could only use it when I’m in wifi. Otherwise I can post via SMS or mobile email from my blackberry.

Or at least I’m SUPPOSED to be able to. When you sign up it asks for your phone number preceded by your country code (which I had a considerable amount of trouble finding on the internet), and then texts you a confirmation number that you type in at the site. This all worked just peachy, but I still find myself unable to send SMS commands to brightkite. I sent invites to a few friends and they didn’t have the same problem. I suspect that Telus has once again spewed copious amounts of FAIL all over my attempts at having fun.

That aside, I still think it’s a really cool social networking deal that people should definitely try out. It’s in beta so it’s invite only, but I have a bunch of invites so drop me a line if you want I should send one your way. You can also sign up for an invite at the site, but that takes about a day or so.

Here’s my “wall”, if you want to take a look: http://brightkite.com/people/Brenderous