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This past Thursday I got to be on StumpMarkus, a weekly broadcast led by Markus Allen of the Marketing Junkies. Although I was incredibly nervous, it was a lot of fun. Markus is a great host and keeps the conversation flowing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a boring show since I’ve been listening, and I always walk away with something new and some interesting sites to check out. If you’d like to hear what I sound like when I’m nervous, here’s the link.

I guess I did okay, since Markus signed up for Plurk AND I was asked to be on Mike Corso’s Cool Site broadcast. Mike’s show starts a short while after Markus’ show ends, so I was actually on 2 shows on Thursday. Here’s the link to listen to Mike’s show.

Thanks so much for having me guys!

Although I talked a little about StumbleUpon on StumpMarkus, the majority of my talk was actually about Plurk. If you haven’t been reading for the past couple weeks, Plurk is my new favorite hangout.

During Mike’s broadcast, he asked why I hadn’t responded to a Plurk he’d sent me. You see, on Plurk, although you can use the @ symbol to link to someone’s page, there’s no way of tracking to see who has sent you messages. I had been away working on a blog post at the time, so unfortunately, I had no idea that Mike had tried to reach me.

I started thinking then that we really needed a way to know someone else has referenced us. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about coding, so can’t write a program to do it. I do know about hacks though, tricks you can use to enhance your experience with a program or site. I love the Hacks series of books. It’s always fun to learn little tricks you can use to make things work better.

When I was told two more times over the past two days that I had missed posts directed towards me, I knew it was time for a solution.

Yesterday evening, I finally came up with an idea, after reading a post that a good friend, LindaZ, the Purpose Connector, wrote.

Whenever there are too many plurks to read, Linda sends out a note to her friends asking what she’s missed that’s important. People reshare the important plurk links with her in one post, so she has a great summary of the day’s main events.

The more I thought about her idea, the more I thought why couldn’t I adapt it?

So what I did is to create a plurk asking people to post if they are referencing me, so I’ll know to come read it. I then linked to the plurk on my user page, so it’s easy to find…and added it to my RSS reader so I can see anything new quickly.

For an example, let’s say you want to know what I’m doing for dinner tomorrow night. You plurk:

Teeg, what are your plans for dinner tomorrow?

Now, unless I’m watching the timeline right then, there’s a good chance I’ll miss that plurk. But, if you click your plurk and look in the bottom right corner, you’ll see “plurk page.”

IF you click that, it will open the plurk on it’s own page, with each remark on a line by itself. But you can also simply right click where it says “plurk page” and select “copy link location” and paste the link without having to open it first. Note: This might be worded a little different depending on which browser you use.

Now, if you come to my user page, underneath the About Me part, you’ll see “Please note @ reply links here so I’ll see them.” Click where it says “here” and it will take you to my @ reply plurk.

If you’re curious what happens on my end, once you add your @ reply as a comment, the link will be bolded in my RSS reader and will tell me how many unread replies I have. Since I check my RSS reader a few times a day, it shouldn’t be long before I see the message.

The nice thing about this is that it will work no matter how many of us use it, but it will work even better as more people start doing it. If I want to write about Tamar’s latest blog post and how much I liked it, I can go to her reply plurk and leave a message directing her to what I just wrote:

@Tamar, check out this plurk

By using this method, if someone has a reply plurk set up, I won’t have to wait until I know that they’re on to make a post I want them to see, and then hope it goes by when they’re actually looking at the screen.

So what do you think? Will this idea work until Plurk decides to add a response page? It still doesn’t answer the question of marking pages that you comment on, but I’m working on that one as well.

It rose up like a storm. Building up slowly in intensity and growing larger and larger until it seemed like the whole world was being covered by twitterers.

People were tweeting from China, from Africa, Australia. Every few hours you’d see another country wake up…or head to bed. Time zones didn’t stop meetings, they just gave you an estimate of how long you’d have to talk.

One of the best parts of Twitter was that you could receive it over instant messenger programs like G-talk or Yahoo. Running it through an IM meant that you could easily receive updates without having to open your browser. Even better, it meant you weren’t stuck at 140 characters if you really had something to say.

I chose to use g-talk with it. I love g-talk for it’s size anyway, I can easily put it in the corner of my screen and see chats while I have my browser set at just a bit smaller than screen size.

Chats would fly by at every hour of the day or night, and often I’d look up from a web page and catch an interesting comment that I’d have to add my two cents to, or see a friend post a link that they liked and have to check it out. It was one of the only things that made Twitter manageable if you had more than 40 or 50 friends who liked to send messages.

One of the best thing about Twitter was that it was real. A while back someone asked on which social media sites are you real friends with people. For me, there were only 2…Twitter and StumbleUpon. Both give you real people without all the extras to hide behind.

Twitter had many lovers. For most of us, it didn’t take very long before we started thinking twitter was the greatest thing since Don Juan. Twitter even made it easy to share with friends. The tweets that flashed across my screen were often riddled with @ symbols, showing that conversations were being carried on.

Perhaps it would have been better if Twitter had died with a bang. Like social martyrs, the sites that go out quickly are remembered and missed. I still miss SixDegrees and it’s been gone since 2001. In fact, I’d join today if it ever returned.

Instead, Twitter is dying with a whimper, a sob, and a sigh. No, it’s not on it’s last gasps yet…not quite, but if it doesn’t make some giant changes soon, it will be. And I’m not entirely convinced that it hasn’t already turned terminal.

There is a promise made between people and a website. The promise that if we invest our time and effort into it, then the site will do its best to meet our needs in its specific area. Twitter seemed to do that, and do it well. In fact, many people were making plans to move their company business communications to twitter. Even more amazing, people were suggesting on their own that twitter come up with a way to charge us. And we were willing to pay.

Twitter was awesome during the first political debates. I left the TV off and followed real people who were actually there instead. Tweeters were impressed and we talked about how much we love twitter. But then we saw signs of things to come.

Twitter went down during Steve Jobs speech. It struggled during conventions when people were trying to tweet the events.

Soon, it didn’t matter if anything special was happening, twitter was going down at least weekly…and then daily…and now it’s not surprising at all to see Twitter’s “Fail Whale” and the poor birds trying to lift it up. Or to miss notifications that people have added you as a friend. Or even to not be able to get your direct messages for 3 days and no notification e-mail to see what it says (that happened to me and it was a business message no less).

There are other messaging sites out there. They’re good, but they’re not Twitter. And although I still love Twitter, I’m not going to try to run a business on it. It’s too risky now. Twitter’s already been down this morning. How many more times it goes down today remains to be seen.

No, I won’t leave Twitter. I’ll put up with it’s whimpers, sobs, and sighs. But it won’t be a monogamous relationship anymore. I’ll turn to other sites to provide me with what Twitter’s taking away.

So, you can still look for me on Twitter, I’ll be there, but I’ll also be on FriendFeed, brightkite, Plurk, Plaxo Pulse, and Pownce along with the other social networking sites. And I’ll be on Ping.fm trying to manage all the sites that it takes to replace one Twitter (if you want to try it, the current beta code is “tastyping”).

So what do you think? Is Twitter in its last days? Will you stay with it and bring friends and business partners to join? Or is it time to declare it dead, bury it and move on to if not bigger and better things, at least sites that will be more stable?