Post Plurk, Present Scour and Livley

In my endless pursuit to see which technology can make social media even more social, I’ve discovered 2 tools which might interest u. But before i begin, let’s start with Plurk, the “almost” kid….

Plurk

Let me say how detached i am from Plurk…  Not that I blame them, i mean it was a novel idea with the timeline and refreshing from Twitter’s breakdown, but i guess this write up which shows 3 important statistics on Plurk (Yeah, I’m a sucker for numbers…) is pretty interesting. If u ever need to know anything after the Plurk hype its these 3 points:

1) Plurk definitely benefited from the blogosphere bump

2) Plurk is very definitely trending downwards.

3) Those that are staying with Plurk are paying a lot more attention

What i like is that it supports wordpress. However, it boils back down to the same question of where the community are. Right now I’m with Friendfeed but I’m curious as to what communities Plurk is building? It might not be heavily focused on social media, but it might include other communities with more personal conversations…(Like the knitting community). Now a microblogging service which caters to niche communities, a product of the long tail. Or will these communities move?

Scour

Ever been frustrated when using a search engine and cant find what u need? Doesn’t matter if its Google, Yahoo! or MSN, sometimes u need to go through 1-2 search engines to get what you need.

What if u had a search engines that combined all the best of the search results? Throw in a little social and these results allow you to add comments and rank them through votes.  What’s neat is that you can filter them by which search engines you want!

If that sounds like the ideal search engine, then Scour is for u. You learn more from the demo here, but what is really awesome is that it rewards its users through the accumulation of points. Similar to all your karma points at Plurk but you get rewarded with Scour points which you can trade for Visa Gift Cards.

Personally I think its really cool (But I’m an optimists with beta products and considering the competition they have to fend off and who the main base of users are going to be) but this idea is great, no more flipping between Google and Yahoo! for me. Just mashing them up together, I’m not too sure on the business side how this is being handled. Who gets the adverting fees for the search and display ads? Care to share any1 who knows?

Lively:

I hated Sims, I dislike Secondlife and I sure as hell am too lazy to explore Lively… After flipping through the site, i just didn’t like the vibe of it… So you can read about this negative review here (Because i want to skew your views to mine, lol…) Jokes aside, can someone plz tell me then what is Google’s purpose of doing this? Another value added service or another dumb mistake in trying to squeeze out more money out of virtual worlds? Or if you’re a huge fan raving about it, tell me whats so different about it?

So i’m off to explore how Plurk is doing after not logging in for a month and which communities are still active there (Crosses finger and hopes for the animal welfare community and not knitting grannies only). Try out Scour and let me know your feedback on it!