140Char

Now this is interesting, as I’m a firm believer that much of the power of Twitter comes from external applications - and that even monetising Twitter could be unlocked by the ways it can be used outside of the current website.

Chirrup is an application which allows you to utilise Twitter for your comments. Simply put, everyone can message you via Twitter, Chirrup fetches all the replies and sorts them by url (So you can have a different feed for each page), and you can then display it however you desire.

It’s slightly more complicated than just copying a widget - but no more than installing a Wordpress plugin. It also caches message locally, and goes through your personal replies rather than the public feed - helping speed. And funnily enough, it’s also available as a Chirrup Wordpress plugin. There’s a developer blog, here, for more.

One of the great things about the current web revolution is that as soon as a website/application appears, someone clever figures out ways to tweak it to improve on it for their needs.

And so, as many people are discovering Plurk, TwisterMC aka Thomas McMahon, has already created a sidebar plugin for Firefox 2 and 3, to use the simplified mobile version of Plurk.

It comes with the Plurk logo of a headless ‘thing’ and a keyboard shortcut. The actual functionality of the sidebar is down to Plurk, and it’s being download right now for a test.

I’ve seen a couple of rumours that Plurk’s creators are too keen on third party applications being developed - perhaps down to Twitter’s downtime problems and the fact 90% of requests to Twitters database comes from external applications. But we’ll see…

Dan Thornton on Plurk.

Julius Solaris on Plurk

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