Plinky: The microblogging apocalypse is here

I am, obviously, a huge fan of blogging, which is why I own and write five blogs in addition to writing this one. I use and occasionally say kind things about the dominant microblogging service Twitter. And of course I'm a huge fan of the Web in general.

On the other hand, everybody knows that most of what you find on the Internet is junk, often junk that's been contrived to grab your attention for no legitimate reason. Some is pure or almost-pure spam; other is more borderline. That's bad enough. But what triggered today's rant is something superficially more innocuous -- Plinky. The idea of Plinky is to help people create "inspired content," by which they mean -- Plinky provides the inspiration. The idea is that Plinky offers a daily "prompt" to give people something to microblog about, after which they'll feed the results into Twitter and the like. This is like throwing a cocktail party, getting the conversation going, then encouraging your guests to run out in the street with megaphones spreading their drunken chatter. Except in this case what people are drunk on is not actual booze, but rather the promise of "social media marketing" and "building your personal brand."

Color me appalled.

More description of Plinky may be found here and here.

Edit:  These three posts, while praising Plinky, all actually illustrate how awful the idea is, in that they share the theme "If you don't have anything to say, Plinky will help you make something up."

• microblogging
• Plinky
• spam
• Twitter