How many days have you sat down in front of your Twitter, and the best you can come up with is “I’m eating two eggs scrambled with bacon and pancakes.” Next, you’re always live-blogging your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, 140 characters at a time, because you can’t come up with anything better to say. Then you update your Facebook status to confess that you’re photo-stalking your ex again. You upload yet another picture of your cat being cute to Flickr. Before you know it, your writers block turns your personal blog into a line-item run-down of your day, and the social network sphere is convinced that your life is completely lame.
Before you unwittingly commit social (network) suicide, you need a springboard of ideas, and fast”"enter Plinky. Plinky asks you a question or prods you to give some sort of a statement”"today’s is “Tell us a secret” while a prompt form last week asked what your first memory is”"and then posts them blog style. All of your responses are collected on your own personal page, and you can answer as many prompts on a day as you want. Depending on the prompt, the site will allow you to upload a photo, insert a Google Map, or any other appropriate illustrative means.
Home screen at Plinky.com.
Like every other Web 2.0 outfit though, you can also read everyone else’s responses. Now because the blogging generation is apparently almost entirely 14 year-old girls, you might have to wade through many responses to find something interesting, but the entire site is as entertainingly voyeuristic as reading a stranger’s Twitter or, yes, even photo stalking a stranger on Facebook.
Because the value of any social network is mostly valued only the number and quality of the people who use it, Plinky offers tight integration to the major blogging platforms”"Twitter, Tumblr, or any site that will allow you to use an embed code”"and will add your post to the site, attracting readers, commenters, and more of your friends to follow along and do the same.
If Plinky reachs a critical mass, it could take off on its own, adding yet another productivity drain to our day. Right now, most prompts average about 100 responses, but this will likely grow with time. Until then, it will still allow the ones of us with, shall we say, less than exciting lives, to at least appear to be a bit more interesting.
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