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.

Odd as it might seem, I love virals. But before I tell you why, I need to clear up the definition of ‘viral’.

The majority are cynical cries for attention by desperate brands running low on ideas. They’re a last ditch attempt to ‘make some waves,’ ‘create some buzz,’ or otherwise justify their digital expenditure. And then there’s the worst viral crime of all: trying to PR a viral before it’s even born.

PR companies frequently pass viral campaigns to me before making them public. Clearly there’s some hope journalists like myself will feature it early on , garnering the client a few column (or web) inches to serve as proof it has ‘gone viral’ and effectively cancelling the need for all that pesky ‘viral’ stuff in the first place.

On the whole, it’s lazy and it stinks. But now and then there are true flashes of genius. Adobe Flashes of genius if you like, and this week I found my favourite yet.

Looking at it objectively, I should have been disgusted. It’s a mash-up of live Twitter posts, YouTube video and, well, international mourning. All the hallmarks of a company chasing the dragon of ‘marketing buzz.’

But this was a bit different: Created by web application firm 9Astronauts, Billie Tweets is a sort of automated sing-along to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, with the words piped direct from the twitter feeds of social media mavens around the globe. Check it out here. You’ll love it, and I’ll tell you why.

As a creative, it’s very clever. From a technical viewpoint, it’s very clever. And the swift-fingered code ninjas who churned it out in two days flat, well, they’re very clever. But none of those things make this a great viral. That all stems from the shrewd idea behind it.

I’d bet folding money 9Astronauts knew Billie Tweets would perform well before they wrote a single line of code. Its masterminds have cottoned on to Twitter fans’ fondness for spreading news about Twitter, realising they love it almost as much as they love spreading news about a worldwide event or crisis.

This week saw tweeting about such an event on an unprecedented scale, with the death of Michael Jackson. So, neatly and with the speed of a Jacko moonwalk, 9Astronauts married the two.

As I said, it’s an ensemble piece. Great execution, a great idea, and perfect timing. 9Astronauts has the web buzzing over its creation already, and if I wanted a Twitter mashup of my own, I’d be hammering down their door. Not for the technical expertise you understand, but for the online understanding and ideas behind it.

And that’s what good viral marketing is all about: ideas. Not cheesy tie-ins or getting people to pass branded messages to their mates. Just pure, gleeful, undiluted ingenuity. The web seems to relish ideas more than radio or TV ever has. They become part of the collective online consciousness. They delight. They amuse. They engage. And yes, we share them too.

Rather than being an interruption, virals become a destination in their own right, and that’s why they’re the future of good online marketing. Still, think you’ve got a killer campaign? Twitter it. See who passes it on. We’ll soon see how good it really is.

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…

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.

My answer never seems complete, perhaps because I always feel like the question should be what does Twitter do for me? Why should I use it? In a reply to James’ story on changes to the Twitter service, @Liz explains just why Twitter is so important too her.

‘it’s that I want to see everything that @BarackObama tweets, no matter who it’s addressed to. I can already do that on the web interface by looking at their profile page but by choosing all @replies, it meant that they came directly to me in my Tweetstream. Now, I have to go out and search for them’.

At Republic we encourage our clients to think about social media as a set of tools. For the end user they can be tools that enable greater understanding and communication with the world around them. Once you know why you want to explore social media platforms, services like Tweetdeck and Newsmap can help you to organize the information you receive into manageable chunks.

We believe that harnessing social media tools in tandem with an clear and concise editorial strategy, forms an instant and accessible way for brands to hold direct a dialogue with their customers.

So what does Twitter do for me? I’m a bit of a world news addict. I started using Twitter’s real time search function around the time of the Mumbai tragedy. I found it a fascinating and easy way to discover real time local opinion and reaction to global events. In a small way this service delivered something that before was hard to access though mainstream media.