A few thoughts on plurk and twitter
Along with many others I’ve been responding to the recent unreliability of twitter by checking out a few of the alternatives that are out there, particularly the dreadfully named but fairly cute plurk. Plurk has quickly gained quite a few users but didn’t make a good first impression with me. The first thing that I was asked after signing up was to hand over my IM username and password to allow them to import my contacts. Being asked for passwords for such a purpose isn’t rare, but as Jeremy Keith so eloquently noted, it’s a very bad idea and— as dopplr show—increasingly unnecessary. That the developers ignored those sorts of details in an attempt to quickly build critical mass for their service makes me wonder how in step they are with other ideas of best practice on today’s web. ...