bitter

I was surprised to see a Plurk message mentioning that they’re shutting down their service. I can smell that “April Fool’s Prank” a mile away. I must admit that Twitter was way easier to use than Plurk. Celebs would rather use twitter coz it’s way easier to type in what they had for dinner and the color of their underwear. Nice try for April Fool’s Plurk!

Plurk to relaunch as Bitter

Dear Friends,

Lately, times have been tough at Plurk. Declining new user growth, a tough economic operating environment (clearly, it is impossible to compete in this space with any less than the portly sum of $55 million USD in VC funding garnered by supposed comparable entities) and severe cases of caffeine induced hysteria amongst rank and file A-Team members (bunch of no good, talentless hacks that they are) have all begun to take their toll on our most beloved service.

Although we have made a valiant attempt to create a truly game changing and unique social communication service here on the web this past year, and desired to push the envelope yet further in the coming months and years, ultimately, we have felt threatened and spooked, much like Facebook has in recent months, of the runaway success of social media darling Twitter. Clearly, the unending, and carefully orchestrated multi-million dollar media/PR blitz coupled with the incessant chatter of unworthy egos, and vacuous self-exhibitionists all vying to win the great ‘most followers’ arms race have done their job in leading millions of minions to this soul-sucking, and dehumanizing service.


Rather than admit defeat with our obviously flawed model of attempting to democratize multi-user social communication and empower users to converse amongst each others as peers, we have chosen, effective immediately, to shut down our present day Plurk service in favour of yet another orgiastic paradise of talking down to others and shouting insipid drivel into the audient void. We have decided to call this wonderful new service of ours Bitter. Here is how it will differ from Plurk:

  • No more emoticons. No fun.
  • Forced usage of geeky conventions such as “@username” and “#blah”.
  • You will be unable to follow conversation replies easily.
  • No more picture or video embeds. Life in mono rocks!
  • Promoting a landfill of unmarked, potentially incentivized and potentially misleading url shortened links.
  • No more private messages to a smaller subset or clique of your friends or followers.
  • Limited customization options aimed at keeping the tone of the service clinical, boring, spammy and lifeless.

http://blog.plurk.com/2009/04/01/plurk-to-relaunch-as-bitter/

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 3:15 pmand is filed under The Blogscene. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.