News Flow

UPDATE 6/3: Akan from Plurk comments below that Plurk was NOT acquired by Pheltup.

Tonight browsing Plurk, I saw heyitskenn’s plurk about the service being acquired by Pheltup

I had first heard about Pheltup through a tweet by msippey, and then saw the launch party on Upcoming.

I hadn’t heard of their acquisition of Plurk yet so I went to Google blogsearch and searched “plurk acquired by pheltup”. There was only one (!) result from a Google crawl of buzztter.com, a site that tracks twitter conversations. Interestingly, the actual tweet hadn’t even been indexed by Google. Seeing @Pheltup in the results was enough for me to know to go to their Twitter page.

Sure enough, Pheltup claims to be acquiring Plurk. The URL goes to a page in the service, which is currently in private testing so I don’t have a login to confirm the news.

It seems like a long time ago when I was relying on RSS feeds and Google alerts to bring me the latest news. These days, I get almost all my news first from Twitter and other micro-broadcasting services, such as Plurk, Pownce, occasionally Brightkite and others. On micro-networks, the flow is multi-directional, short, fast, and immediate. I drop in on the flow or it pings me. The tempo of the interactions is even more spontaneous and immediate than the interactions than the preceding blogs and email alerts. I can feel the network at work. It comes in the form of people’s personal thoughts or interests. Follow enough people with interests that align with yours, with some other eclectic sources in the mix, and you’re bound to hear the news.

Of course, whether there’s any truth to this news is still debatable since some think the new social network, Pheltup is a hoax, complete with its own room on FriendFeed and thread on Get Satisfaction. Guess we’ll see what happens at their launch party. See you there?

UPDATE 6/3: Akan from Plurk comments below that Plurk was NOT acquired by Pheltup.