I find it interesting that AOL would attempt to play a humor card while they tout their own rusty horn, especially when you consider this is the same AOL that uses Google to power their search engine. Excuse me a second while I point out that this makes everyone at AOL look like a pack of three-year-olds without a babysitter and add myself to the numerous people who agree.

As someone who’s had rather interesting personal experiences with AOL over the past decade or so, I find their behavior here fairly lame.  Given those same experiences, though, I guess I can’t be too surprised.

I do have some words of advice for AOL, though (and I can think of a few others who can take something away from this as well, in a more generalized form, of course):

• When you’re trying to mock a company who may be trailing you in one area, it might be wise to consider whether you’re partners with them or not in another.  Nobody wants to do business when the only words you can say are, “I’m better than you,” especially when you seem to have forgotten that you’re not.
• Just because you’ve managed to beat someone to market with something as silly as an IM to SMS bridge doesn’t make you better.  I can’t exactly call most of Google’s offerings bloated, but I do suggest you go take a look at the whale you call your Internet portal and see how much fat you can trim out.  If it can’t function, I don’t care that it looks all glossy and shiny and can make little noises to notify me that somebody’s picking their nose.
• Perhaps there’s more to the Google branding than meets the eye, especially in professional terms.  Before you make a snide comment about Google only allowing users a Gmail domain, perhaps consider that nobody is going to use an address such as nicktabick@crazyforemail.com to conduct professional business.  (I find that address too stupid for personal use, either.  I also believe I’ve seen that address in my Spam folder before, but I digress…)
• If Halloween is a grand occasion to make fun of one of your partner/competitors, I wonder what Christmas is going to be like at the AOL offices this year.  However, for everyone’s sake, it might be better to ensure that the liquor, sugar, caffeine, and everything else that might get one of the press writers giddy is safely locked up lest someone posts a follow-up entry making fun of Time Warner.

Perhaps someone at AOL had a few too many candy bars before they came in for work (or, from the look of the timestamp on their post, on their lunch break).  Nice try, but next time around, use the sugar rush on something more productive – like decent software.

I decided to give Plurk a try for myself and see what, if anything, set it apart from my now-established Twitter account, or similar alternatives like Pownce or Jaiku.  And to be frank, I don’t think there’s too much going for it; just about everything Plurk has developed concept-wise can be replicated with the Twitter API and a few lines of code.

Your “home” page is taken up mostly by a large horizontal timeline showing recent ‘plurks’ (even more obnoxious than ‘tweets,’ I realize) made by anyone you’re following updates from.  Unlike Twitter, there are two stages of followers, fans and friends.  Fans get the updates posted by that other person, but without the harassment of a ‘Can I be your friend?’ e-mail.  Friends, of course, is self-explanatory.  The timeline is supposed to be ‘realtime’ in that you can click a plurk and see all of the responses…but for all that effort, Plurk pops up a small notification box that there are new replies and plurks for you to look at rather than just adding them.  (Why not just add them and color-code them according to freshness from the last page reload?)  The timeline is also poorly-responsive; it takes a few seconds to scroll over on my machine, and no doubt it will be even slower as people and plurks add up.

One of Plurk’s minor benefits is that they follow the unwritten “microblogger” rule – that is, 140 words maximum – but you can use one of their ‘predefined’ verbs to save a few characters and make sure the verb gets a colorful highlight.  Of course, this only helps if you find yourself constantly nearing the edge and looking for any way to get your character count down, or if you can be bothered to navigate the menu with your mouse.  Plurk’s commenting system threads the responses together, at least, to make for some slight semblance of organization without all the click-throughs (Twitterers, meet Quotably), which makes it a tiny bit more organized.  But this also means you fall out of the conversation entirely if you aren’t following the initial poster.

Plurk also finds a major shortcoming in the way some of the site features (well, not even features, just extra smiley faces and the like) are locked until you establish your presence on Plurk by way of the Plurk Karma system.  Essentially, Plurk will analyze your participation once a day, and assign you a value from 0 to 100 based upon your interactions with the site and other users.  Making new friends or posts, or even uploading a profile picture all affect your Karma score.  Now, it’s an interesting way of getting people involved, but when it requires you to post nearly constantly to change the Plurk logo (yes, logo), I think it’s safe to say that there’s too little thought put into it.  Emoticons aren’t a big reason people are going to stick around…

Plurk also lacks an API and any semblance of SMS support (for the moment, at least), which means that you have to keep the page open or sign up your IM account (thankfully, they at least offer more than Google Talk).  And speaking of IMs, any updates to the timeline also get IMed to you, including responses from people you’ve never met, so if you’re following anyone who gets a lot of attention, your IM client will be getting a bit of attention too.  You can turn them off with off and on commands, post plurks, and respond to the nine or ten most recent comments on other plurks, but there’s really no use otherwise.

I’m sorry, but a headless dog does not a microblogging site make.  Plurk, it’s a great shot…but you’re going to need to offer something that can’t be replicated in thirty seconds on Twitter.  Oh, and lose the comment about emo-ness on your homepage.  Emos never share their emoness.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to befriend me on Plurk, but don’t expect any activity until (updated as of June 3) as Plurk has joined Twitter and Pownce at Ping.fm or some other multi-updater.

Alright, the emo joke might be a bit over the top, but I’m not the only one.  There are plenty of tweets about it, if only I hadn’t lost the URLs.

(Technically, it’s last Friday, but I think it counts since I’m still having to deal with it…)  I’ve got a new hard drive in my dedicated server (see previous post) after the previous one failed suddenly, and everything seems to be working out so far.  Everything except TechCentric has found its way back up already, and I’m working to get the show back as soon as I can.  (And of course, the obvious side effect is that everything is reinstalled from scratch once again.)

Also, earlier this week, as the result of my newfound photographic habits and my recent camera purchase, I ran out of space on my Picasa account. (As a quick aside, why can we have 6GB+ for e-mail, and just a single gigabyte of photo storage?)  After looking into a couple of different solutions, I ultimately decided that sticking with Picasa was my best choice, and sank $20 into some additional space.  Hopefully I should be set for a while (and hopefully by the time I need to get more, they lower their prices a bit… ).

If you haven’t been keeping track, Canonical has released the latest version of Ubuntu, 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron”.  This is their next long-term support release, which means that Hardy will get updates for three years on typical desktop installations, and five years for server installations.  This is also the first time I’ve been able to successfully use the automated upgrader without major issues (and a corresponding reinstallation from CD).  Of course, there are a few quirks I’m tending to, but it’s running happily for me on my crapified laptop.

It took a while to arrive, but today also marks the day my Pinnacle PCTV Remote Kit for Vista arrived from Woot.  It performs remarkably better than I anticipated, especially when you consider the one quirk that Pinnacle never did – using it on Windows XP.  Thanks to Paul Alger of Ironclad.net, you too can use it on Windows XP with the implementation of a hacked-up driver.  For those of you freaking out, the install is painless, and the remote is detected as a USB HID device.  The only issue I have is that not all the buttons work (and I’m currently looking for something that can pick them up so that I can remap them).  But nevertheless, it kills the basics of distant (I’d say remote, but that would be clichéd) media control.

Perhaps the most exciting (for me, anyway) of this week so far is my finally giving in and signing up with Twitter.  For those not in the know, Twitter is a service that enables you to share what you’re doing (though the people I’ve seen also tend to post random thoughts or occurances, which is also fun) via the web, SMS, or IM to make sure you’ve got a way to keep your “followers” updated.  It also appears that Twitter’s managed to grow themselves a cult, as there are several third-party applications and resources to make your Twitter experience all the more flexible.

I’ve only been using it a few days, but I’m rather enjoying it.  If you’ve got an account, feel free to follow me (see the sidebar on the homepage).

I hate to be all about me, me, me…but I guess I’ll let it go this once.