Plurk is a social media site that allows you to send the now standard 140 characters and pass them on to others who are Plurking.

Plurk takes everything that Twitter has to offer and ramps up the game by bringing onboard video and pictures that you can share right from within the service. However, it’s the Plurk wall that hits you the hardest. For the first time user it can be a little daunting getting used to all your activities up in front of you (one colleague has fled the service as it’s a too much to handle).

Once you’ve come to terms with the UI Plurk does offer quite a lot – the couple of late nights recently spent playing with it are testament to that fact. Getting to grips with Plurk seems to be the aim of the game but I’ve not seen many people using it over Twitter yet.

People seem to have cottoned on to Plurk and are using it much as they do Twitter. So, the question is are they actively using it as a real alternative, or, like me, is everyone just seeing what’s coming down the pipe?

1. The Queen hits Twitter
That’s right HRH has joined the social networking revolution with her own Twitter page. Technically it’s actually the whole Royal family’s Twitter page, and none of them will actually be tweeting. That’s left up to two teams at Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. STill at least it shows the Monarchy aren’t as out of touch as some people seem to think.

2. Health officials spend £30 million on marketing
“Where’s the social media link?” you say. Well, health officials have set aside a budget of £30 million to spend over the next three years on a marketing campaign to raise awareness on healthy eating, obesity and the like, with Facebook and Twitter being the main focus. Naturally, this has come under fire, with critics suggesting the money would be better off spent elsewhere. But at a time when advertisers are attaching increasing importance to the amount of time people spend on a site, then why shouldn’t health officals adopt a similar stance? After all Facebook is one of the biggest sites in the world, and Twitter is growing at an unprecedented rate.

3. PrankNET gets probed
Think prank calls are funny? The FBI certainly doesn’t. They’re investigating increasingly violent ‘pranks’ done by PrankNET – an anonymous prank-calling internet group. The group have claimed responsibility for such “pranks” as convincing staff in a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant to douse the restaurant with fire-suppressing chemicals, evacuate the building and strip off their clothes in the freezing cold. Now, firstly that’s not a very funny prank. And secondly, who in their right mind would follow those instructions anyway?

4. Google Street View hits Stonehenge
The internet road-mapping service, Google Street View, has decided to extend its service from driving routes to popular off-road destinations, such as the Angel of the North, Loch Ness and Stonehenge. The service has had its issues with privacy laws in the past, but I doubt Nessie will be kicking up a fuss. The Druids on the other hand, might pose a different challenge…

5. iPhone rings pure
You can get all sorts of applications for the iPhone nowadays. Applications that turn it into a satnav. Apps that run your bath for you. And now you can even get a Purity Ring iPhone application. Basically you take a “purity pledge” and a spinning silver ring is displayed on your iPhone’s screen. Whether this will work is debatable. Unless your iPhone also gives you a shock when you’re about to get frisky, I can’t believe that a spinning ring will stop you. But then I am weak willed.

The fact that this story caused so much of a stir in the first place suggests the tactic worked. The head honchos at Habitat, despite the negative slant on the story, must be overjoyed with the “free” publicity. As someone famous once said: there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Unless it’s our own obituary. That’s pretty bad.

A quick apology on Sky News for the “abuse”, and that’s scant payment for tech sites and news channels across the UK talking about your furniture store. Seriously this must be the most coverage Habitat’s had since they started selling those awesome pebble lights. No? They’re really good.

What I’m trying to say is, essentially the principles used here were good ones. Using keywords (hastags) to get your story noticed. It’s the same principle for stories in Google. You just have to ensure that you stick to the unwritten code of social media ethics. Using keywords that have nothing to do with your story (we fail to see what iPhone 3GS, Apple and Iran have to do with Habitat) is just bad practice. You might even call it mis-tweetment. Ha ha. HA!

That said I don’t think the bosses at Habitat will be too angry. Like I said, I don’t remember the last time this furniture company was hitting the headlines. Now, if only they could learn to use social media properly…

The New York Times published an interesting piece on the effort that Apple goes to keep the cult of secrecy going at Cupertino, with staff limiting contact with the press and senior execs even feeding lies to employees to see where leaks appear. It’s an eye-opening piece, and well worth a read.

The general tone of the article implies that Apple still deals with the media as companies did in the 1980s, rather than in the web 2.0 era, where multinational companies like Dell embrace social media, actively blogging, tweeting and churning out photos for all to see and use on a Flickr photostream. It’s a fair point, and an approach fewer companies, tech ones especially, are using still.

And yet, that still plays in Apple’s favour. Two of the world’s most popular and valuable blogs, MacRumors and AppleInsider, are dedicated to the pursuit of digging up whatever titbits of Apple future tech they can find. Any new Apple launch immediately trends on Twitter, and while Apple can take its online store down for hours at a time to update it with shiny new products, it more than makes up for it with boosted business in the hours afterwards, as anticipation is cranked up no end.

But Apple is the exception that proves the rule here. The public couldn’t give a cow’s udder about any other company that tries to enforce quite the same regime of secrecy. If Apple’s relationship with its customers is still one way, many others are using social media to open up the conversation (Take O2 and its excellent use of Twitter, as I highlighted the other week), bringing in John and Jane Smith and making a giant corporation feel that bit less impersonal. It’s something that we recognise here at Republic across our portfolio, particularly with sites like Nokia Conversations and NokNok.

Of course, I could be wrong and my bosses have been working on some super secret project that goes completely against what I just said. I’m off to landgrab RepublicPublishingInsider.com…

For better or worse, I’m what you’d call a belts-n-braces reviewer. When it comes to testing stuff, my policy is fairly easy – act like a punter. It’s easy for a journalist to get excited about the latest tech when it’s couriered over and they get to play with it for a month, and get paid for the privilege. That way also leads apathy, as you end up only wanting to review the latest and greatest, which in truth is only a small part of reviewing with an audience in mind. Most people only turn to reviews when they are actively in a buying mode and then it’s all about the experience and not the hype.

Experience and expertise aren’t about getting excited at the drop of a tech spec (or a carefully crafted press release), it’s about understanding the market you’re writing for and getting that across in as entertaining but informative a manner as possible. If that just so happens to be with a good measure of SEO and social media tools on top, then all the better.

These are the things that have been going round my head of late, as we’re gearing up for a changes around Republic Towers. Electricpig is in a period of change, but I’ll leave that for James Holland to discuss at a later date. My news, as you may have guessed, involves mobile computing, reviews and a large dollop of common sense buying advice. Over the next few weeks we’ll be bringing you more news about what this entails but for now, it’s enough to know that it’s all going to be in the safest of hands!

Take the events unfolding in Iran in recent weeks. During the recent contested Iranian elections, the Revolutionary Guard, an elite military force that answers to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told the Iranian state news service that bloggers must remove all material that could “create tension” from the internet or face legal action. That includes the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

The internet has been a vital tool for reporting the events to the rest of the world, especially after the government clamped down on independent media in an attempt to control the images of election protests. That, obviously didn’t stop some determined Twitterers.

It’s an intriguing insight into the importance of social media sites, compounded by the fact that the US government no less asked Twitter to postpone a scheduled downtime so Iranians could continue to post images and reports of any demonstrations and protests.

Problems arise, however, in trying to deduce whether certain posters are actually who they say they are. Posts on Twitter recently have echoed the sentiment, suggesting that certain posters may even be government plants. While other posts clearly came from people who weren’t even in Tehran.

What does all this tell us about social media? Well, the fact that social networking sites are being used as tools by journalists in all walks of life, to get information out to the general populace, suggests that its importance has grown at a phenomenal rate. Yes it’s open to manipulation, but look back at Mussolini’s control of the newspaper Avanti to further his Fascist beliefs. Look at how Hitler manipulated Germany’s national press with his propaganda minister Paul Josef Goebbels developing sophisticated and effective tools of propaganda to control public opinion in Germany. It’s not something new. The media tools have always been manipulated. The fact that social media tools have also been subject to that mis-use is just another affirmation that social media is here to stay.

All jokes aside, it’s hard to miss a big new product from Apple, even if you’re not in the slightest bit interested with technology. That’s certainly the case on Twitter, where Apple, iPhone and WWDC (The conference it was unveiled at) were all trending topics before Apple executive Phil Schiller even took to the stage.

What you may or may not have seen was another trending topic on Twitter today that emerged once Apple fans had swept the broken shards of jaw off the floor and duck taped them back together to read through the fine print: #o2fail.

O2 is the network with exclusive rights in the UK to the iPhone 3G S, as the new model is called, and in the hours after the iPhone unveiling, it put up the pricing plans for the different tariffs, along with a little smallprint. Unlike last year, when original iPhone owners were able to get out of their contract and pay a set amount to jump to the iPhone 3G, iPhone 3G owners will have to pay extra to get out of their current contracts. Almost everyone I follow seemed to have a gripe about O2 today, and some Twitterers even started petitions for “reasonable” iPhone pricing.

Now, some of O2’s pricing is fair enough (The iPhone 3G is subsidised by O2 on monthly contracts, so it needs you to cough up for the entire contract to stay in the black), and some of it is Scrooge-like (Despite a price cut in the US, the iPhone 3G is still the same price in the UK it was a year ago). But it’s fascinating to now see Twitter as the – realtime – forum to air all these woes. Even the petitions doing the rounds are built with the Twitter API.

O2 has actually been answering questions on Twitter via @o2 for some time now, and while it didn’t address general 140 character grumbles, it was responding to any individual tweet about the new iPhone pricing throughout last night and today. And despite the hostile messaging, it was staying positive and helpful throughout (“We’ll be in touch when you are eligible to upgrade”).

The upshot? You’ve got to give credit to O2’s marketing department, if not the beancounters elsewhere in the company. It’s recognised Twitter is an important, and crucially public, communication platform. It expected questions to come flooding in on Twitter, and it was on hand to answer them when they did. If only all companies tried to be this accessible.

The thing that has struck me the most is that the concept of what ’social media’ actually is seems to be getting in the way and making firms who have a firm understanding of who they are and what they do, suddenly very nervous. I sit there and wait for the nervous ticks to start, knowing that any minute the phrase ’so, what’s this social media thing then?’ is about to be asked.

It strikes me the hurdle to understanding what it is, is the phrase itself: Social Media. It sounds so big, so serious that people panic. For me social media is just a delivery method, a set of tools like any other to be used as and when appropriate. After all, you wouldn’t swat a fly with a bar-bell, so why get involved with social media just because everyone else seems to be doing so

Ben made a very valid point last week, that most social media tools will align together in the coming years, which will make things easier to get a grip on. However, even the best social media doesn’t work without content, which still boils down to words and pictures. It’s just that the words are online and free to roam (so tricky to control) and the pictures can be photos or videos.

For many companies, the idea of not controlling the information, or conversation, is the main fear. The question you need to ask yourself is ‘what do I want to get out of it?’ For most companies, what they want is a new way of getting in touch with existing customers and addressing their concerns quicker. In many cases, this doesn’t need a social media strategy, it just needs the company to be a little more open, a little freer with information.

Then there is the problem that social media isn’t like a tap you can turn on and off at will – social media is more a spring, constantly bubbling away giving up information and ideas. One of the beauties of working on NokNok is that Nokia is open to the idea of what social media means – being open to people prodding, probing and asking awkward questions. Sure, it’s about talking about one company, it’s products and its services but by openly discussing it, those ideas are pushed around to other people, other sites and other influencers.

In the end, social media is a means of delivery, it’s not a solution in and of itself. As long as you’ve got your part right, starting the conversation, leaving the well-spring to bubble away with conversations is a job done well!

It started with Twitter clients. Twitter is a great form of communication, hampered by a clunky web interface. Smart devs took advantage of the API and trotted out clients that update in realtime, resized to slap on the side of your screen or altered for mobile. Some of them (Tweetie, say) might even be making a substantial profit, unlike Twitter itself.

Then, Facebook got a little jealous and rolled out a new Facebook publisher bar to publish comments, links and media, just like Twitter. Suddenly, it made sense to start having a Twitter client that brought both sites together: Twhirl’s successor Seesmic Desktop does just that.

Now though, we might have just seen the apex of that progression: Google Wave. Unveiled at Google’s I/O conference, it’s not web 2.0, it’s not web 3.0, it’s just everything rolled into one system. You can message people, share content drag and drop stylee, have messages shown being tapped out in realtime, and conversations embedded in websites. If that sounds a bit confusing, check out the demo video below. It’s long, but well worth a watch, and can explain it far better than words (Google Wave isn’t just about words after all).

Here’s the thing: when it launches (next year), Google Wave isn’t going to replace any of these services I mentioned above. It’s just going to bring them all together, and in your browser to boot. There’s already a Twitter gadget for it, Twave, and the API is out there right now to make much more. It’s not hard to imagine everything from Digg to BBC iPlayer from getting on board with it too.

That’s where the next goal lies: grouping all your communication and social media together to make it accessible in one place. Maybe Google Wave won’t be the holy grail of it. But that’s where we’re going.

He was supposed to play three nights at Brixton Academy last week and when you’ve got tickets in hand, the time off and everything booked for a full weekend in London you want to make sure everything is in place, including the gigs. Now, news of the Thursday night gig getting cancelled came through nice and early, the NME got the story out there good and early. Then it was a case of waiting to see if there was a domino effect and they would all fall. Sure enough, they did but no one knew until the last minute – largely because the media had already moved on but also because Morrissey’s ‘people’ were a bit slow in getting the word out there.

What’s this got to do with social media you ask? Well, it seems the people who look after Morrissey’s website and MySpace page aren’t the best at keeping it up to date, so who do you turn to when you need to know what’s going on? Other people in the same boat as you – tweets, forum posts and discussion boards have been working over time since week making sure that those who needed to know were informed.

Now, people sharing information is fantastic and makes life easier but at the same time, what really would have helped would the powers that be also understanding that getting the message out there quickly and in the most appropriate way – posting a website message at the last minute when most people will have already set off is a little, well last century.

Great content, whether it’s details of a postponed gig, product messaging or just a fantastic news story, won’t work on its own, you need to be pro-active and take the message to the people in the format they want to access it – this is what social media is showing is.

Image: Virgin Media