There’s a bit of unrest among the Twitter natives. The service is up and it’s down and…it is what it is.

What it is to me - I’ve been using Twitter for almost 2 years, and as I’ve said I’ve been on long enough to fall in love and out of love and back in love with it. Now 2x over. I also wrote a response to a Brian Solis post about how disappointed I was in their handling of certain seeming violations in their Terms of Service. Then I felt guilt about piling on without knowing both sides of the story.

Twitter was - almost - the first (anyone remember Dodgeball?) and despite scaling issues have done it better than anyone else. Jaiku is pretty much done (Is Google the place where Web 2.0 apps go to die? Jaiku? Delicious? Dodgeball?) with no movement since the acquisition. But now there are new option seemingly every day, Plurk, identi.ca and Posterous among them. FriendFeed is a big favorite among early adopters, with the opportunity to have longer conversations and comments for each of you and your friends items.

There are also push services, like Ping.fm and BlogIt, which can push status updates and blog posts to a number of services at the same time. Personally, I feel weird about that. I have many “friends” across the different services and it feels like I’m spamming them instead of concentrating on delivering unique content. My issues, not yours

Twitter (and Facebook) is where the my conversations are and where I’ve met people who have become personally important to me. There are talented people, who I’ll never meet, who I look at their Twitter pages each day. I’ve had job interviews and opportunities because of Twitter and have met a ton of smart people who I now count as friends (or collegues). I check in to FriendFeed, I look at the other services I’m on - but those are appointment check-ins, not integrated into my daily workflow.

In fact - I still can’t get excited about Plurk - and I know plenty of people who are. I just can’t get past the interface (again, my issue!) and the whole karma point system makes no sense to me. Many of my connections love it and I plan on checking in every once in a while - it’s just not for me. On the other hand, I’m enjoying Posterous and the simplicity of emailing all of my updates, pictures, etc. It’s easy and fast.

Do the Twitter down times disturb me? More of a gentle to general state of annoyance. Do I wish they would set their business model? Uh, yeah (I’m sure they can’t wait to do that too). But I love the service and the team - both of which have changed the daily way I communicate with the world. And have brought me opportunities and people in my life that I would have never had before Twitter.

(And BTW - it’s still FREE!).

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(First - full disclosure - ooVoo is a client of crayon).

This week I’m involved in a pretty amazing event - My ooVoo Day Political (MODP). ooVoo is a video communications platform that allows up to 6 people to chat simultaneously. A couple of months ago, the social media community got together for a charity event - My ooVoo Day - where all the proceeds went to charity. It was quite a success. This time around, My ooVoo Day is about politics.

This is a really incredible Election Year, with many people participating for the first time. For the first time, after years of talking about it, we’re seeing young people registering and becoming really active. My ooVoo day Political is about taking all of those conversations from all different issues and platforms and giving them a forum. All ages, all opinions, all parties invites - respect all the way around.

My ooVoo Day Political started on Monday (Video will be up shortly and I’ll link to it) and will continue through August 4th. We’ve had a lot of spirited conversation and I’ve had a lot of fun watching people use  and fall in love with technology that they might not have used before. So grab your webcam and head over to My ooVoo Day Political, look at the different hosts and sign-up for a session or two.

Just another way of participating in the political process!

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I am a huge Joss Whelan - Buffy - Serenity fan - he’s imaginative, fun and I love the way he writes his female characters. This is a man who likes women. So I was exceptionally bummed when a studio passed on his Wonder Woman script.

Then out of the writer’s strike came “Dr. Horrible’s Sing Blog“, with Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion and Felicia Day. How does that not sound like a great time?

From http://doctorhorrible.net/

“Dr Horrible” is not a a new TV show or movie. It’s a streaming event, with the first Act starting today (7.15), Act II on 7.17 and Act III on 7.19. The free airings are only available until the 20th and then it’s the looonng wait (hopefuly not) to the DVD release.

Let’s talk social.

Of course this isn’t some indie production with no marketing budget relying on Word of Mouth to drum up interest. This is a guy with a devoted fanbase that will follow him anywhere and to any medium. So instead of the large, mega-ad campaign - they relied on that fanbase to spread the news:

• The Official Site
• Facebook Official
• Myspace Official
• Myspace Fan
• Twitter Official
• Capt. Hammer Comic
• Wikipedia Entry
• Dr Horrible on IMDB

Additional interviews and information is housed at Dr. Horrible.net.

So run, not walk to DrHorrible.com or buy the “season’s pass’ on iTunes - 7,926 Facebook , MySpace, etc. users can’t all be wrong…

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There are blogs that are a addictive must-read - clusterflock is one of those for me. This just came across my reader - and I think it’s an different social take. And an unexpected smile.

Postcrossing’s idea is simple - send a postcard, get a postcard from someone picked at random around the world. It’s kind of link getting a bunch of surprises by mail (remember - actual mail? In your mailbox? That’s not a bill or junk?).

How does it work? (from the website)

• request an address from the website
• mail the postcard to the address
• wait to receive a postcard
• register the received postcard in the system

Go to the website to read more on the specifics.

This reminds me of messages in bottle and having pen-pals in grammer school - nostalgia and poloroids.

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With all of the up and down (time) of Twitter, many people are looking at alternatives for their microblogging platform of choice. Tonight I noticed (ironically through Twitter) a number of my friends trying out Plurk.

My Plurk Page

Plurk has a very visual timeline that also tracks the comments in real time (the unread comments show up in your browser tab in FireFox). Right now, there’s no way to differentiate comments to your plurks or your friends without actually clicking on the “Show all” link.

They also track interaction by awarding karma points (from the website):

“Every plurker has his/her own karma value. It is recalculated every day and falls within these intervals:

• 0.00 to 21.00: You are in the state of creation
• 21.00 to 41.00: You are in the state of maintenance
• 41.00 to 61.00: You are enlightened
• 61.00 to 81.00: You are so close to Plurk Nirvana
• 81.00 to 100.00: You have reached Plurk Nirvana!

Your karma score is directly influenced by your and your friends Plurk activity. The more active you are, the more points you’ll get. Using various features of Plurk such as instant messaging or uploading a profile image will also help.

Invite your real friends to boost your karma!”

It’s weird that you can’t fill out your profile with a description (250 characters) without reaching 40 karma points.

There are growing pains - I’ve already gotten a couple of database errors and I was unable to use any of the “Find a Friend” tools. But there are a couple of things I like - the “Alert” feature makes it easy to see who friends you (or accepted your requests) and there’s a group feature - “Cliques” - which has always been a missing Twitter feature for me.

It’s fun to try out, but the true test is how easily it folds into my workflow. I do like that Plurk is supported by Profilactic (which feeds my Lifestream page) and a number of people that I follow are already trying it out. As the service (and my use of it) grows, I’ll post my updated impressions.

Please feel free to friend me on Plurk.

UPDATE: Interesting Reading:

Plurk: Our Philosophy in a Walnut Shell

Sean Percival - Plurk: Timeline Based Microblogging

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Just FYI - I wrote a post on the Semantic Web for our company’s blog here. Please feel free to read and comment.

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Thanks to my FriendFeed, I saw a blog entry from Fred Wilson about Disqus.

Disqus adds threaded comments to your blog, instead of the usual inline comments and or using the @convention. This has been a nagging annoyance of mine - threaded comments makes for understandable conversation flow. It’s hard to interact when every new comment seems to start a new point and conversation, even if it’s an actual reply.

Disqus replaces the existing comment structure with their own (hosted) solution. Once I uploaded and activated the plugin it took me only a few moments to set everything up - I was worried about losing existing comments and checking the “entries with no comments and future posts” option left everything intact. I then went to the Disqus website to set up my profile and enable my settings.

In his post, Fred Wilson says that the number of comments and interaction on his blog has gone up five to tenfold. I tweeted about installing Disqus and immediately got a response from Daniel Ha (co-founder), who pointed me to this FAQ page.

Disqus features:

• Integrates with your blog
• Receive/reply to comments by email or SMS
• You can subscribe to conversations
• Moderate and block unwanted comments/commenters
• Very customizable

Disqus works with a number of blogging platforms including WordPress, TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger and Tumblr (my next Disqus site!). Sites that have implemented Disqus (according to the post, there are over 10,000 blogs) include Fake Steve Jobs, Scripting News, Rev2.org and, of course, A VC.

I’m looking forward to seeing what impact Disqus has on the conversations on my blog and will update with any significant impact.

Other posts on this topic:

• Mathew Ingram
• Howard Lindzon

UPDATE: ReadWriteWeb’s Corvida compares SezWho to Disqus and Intense Debate

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Jeff Jarvis in his BuzzMachine post today discusses his Guardian article about Gary Vaynerchuk. I had the pleasure of seeing Gary at a TechMeetup at Webster Hall a few weeks ago and in ten minutes changed the way I was looking at my job and my life. Not an exaggeration.

Go pre-order his book and look at his videos on WineLibraryTV. Go now.

Jeff Jarvis really captures the excitement and devotion that Gary inspires in anyone who watches his content or is lucky enough to meet him, as well as a great glimpse into his background.

Gary Vaynerchuk is the American Dream personified in Social Media.

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I’ve been using Mahalo, Jason Calacanis’s “people-powered” search engine for about 5 months - and am really enjoying it.

Mahalo uses “guides” to build our SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) so that the most relevant results are always given the most importance. The problem is the amount of manpower it takes to build out all of those results. So, besides the actual Mahalo employees, the service looks to crowdsourcing to fill in the results - and will pay them for their work (Mahalo Greenhouse).

Then came Mahalo Social, which added a social component to the service and Mahalo Follow, a way of sharing the links you upload to other services including De.lic.ious, Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Jaiku and StumbleUpon. This was actually the piece that helped me get more involved with StumbleUpon, as Tamar Weinberg - AKA Queen of all Social News sites - was always after me about. Using a quick combination of keystrokes, I can easily post a link to all of these sites, or any combination I’d like.

As an aside - I rarely post links to Twitter - I’m protective of my network and don’t want to spam them with a lot of links.

But what makes any company - especially a startup - is the people. And everyone that I’ve had contact with from Mahalo has been impressive. If I send a feature request or some bug report, it’s been rare that I don’t hear from someone within the hour. Jason has been very gracious about forwarding reports to the right people and I always hear back with solutions or a commitment to fix the issue. This has really added to my enjoyment of Mahalo - even when my links are denied (or added!), it’s with a very polite note.

So who uses Mahalo? I”ve started using Mahalo for search results - it’s fun to see what people recommend and I really enjoy the Guide Notes. But the real value is for people who are looking for simple, specific results, or find Google results too confusing. It’s always hard for me to remember that most people don’t use the Web like I do and need easy tools that make them comfortable. Then I spend some time with my sister, an elementary school teacher with her first Mac, who doesn’t know what Twitter is and is nervous about shopping online. So I bookmarked Mahalo for her. With the easy and clean user interface, she’ll be able to find whatever she needs quickly (Google results are also included on the page).

And that’s valuable to both of us.

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I’ll be at a few events in the next few weeks - please find me and say hello if your attending any of these!

April 25th and 26th - Podcamp NYC, Brooklyn NYC

May 7th to 9th - “Food for Thought”, a conference on unconventional creativity, Greenville, NC. I’ll be participating on a panel on the 8th.

May 10th - SocialDevCamp in Baltimore MD

June 13th - BlogPotomac, Falls Church, VA

I’m also looking into going to Graphing Social Patterns East in Washington DC, June 9th to the 11th.

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