Sunday, December 7, 2008

Plurking, Twittering, Gmail chatting, Facebooking, iChatting

Like most of us, the places where I'm supposed to update my status have proliferated. I can keep my tweets and Facebook statuses synced, and supposedly the same thing is available through the Plurk Facebook app, though I've never been able to get that to load.

But what I really want is a Plurk-like timeline journal where I can keep both public and private updates at once. You see, I'm on Plurk because I'm on some projects where the team uses it to keep in touch. I see the potential in the application to be something I've wanted for a long time -- a desk journal of sorts where I can jot down decisions made, people met with, outcomes of conversations -- anything I might need to look up later when people ask "what happened with that? when? who was involved?" Plurk's searchability and automatic timestreaming make it a natural for that.

However, it looks like I don't have the option to plurk something only to myself. I can either make all my plurks personal (nobody else ever sees anything I post, which removes the functionality of communicating with a team), or I can make them all available to the group (my friends or the world at large). There are "private" plurks, but they must be shared with at least one person or group. I tried to create an empty group, but Plurk wouldn't allow it. I tried to share the private plurk with my own username, but the search for me came up empty.

It seems the only way for me to have it all with Plurk is to create a second Plurk identity. I can then share my desk-diary plurks with that alter ego. The only reason I hesitate to do this is its inelegance.

Backpack now has a journal feature which seems to be more what I'm looking for (although I'd miss the wonderfully intuitive Plurk timeline). Yet I don't want to add another journaling application to my already-full journaling agenda.

Any suggestions?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A notebook and a pen? You could even write "Private Plurk" on the front! :)

donnadb said...

Not really globally searchable in the way that I'm hoping. :) I keep a Moleskine with that info now, but the searching bedevils me -- you have to know approximately when something happened in order to find it, and that's often precisely what I don't know.