Plinky is a new service that operates a bit like Twitter, but instead of asking what you’re doing right now Plinky asks you a different question every day. Sounds intriguing? It certainly adds some dynamics to the concept of microblogging Twitter ushered in a few years ago.
After registering your Plinky account, you can go right ahead and answer the day’s prompted question. For me, it was “Share where you’d fly for the weekend if your best friend had a helicopter.” You can choose to answer this prompt or you can skip to the next one. Some prompts are pretty basic, such as the one I received today. Others are more conclusive, and have multiple parts to answer. And depending on the context of a given prompt, Plinky will incorporate other media (maps, photos, etc.) into users’ answers.
If you’d like to use Plinky as yet another launching pad for content you’d like to spread across the web, you can do so. Actually, that’s the point of Plinky–to easily create comprehensive content and redistribute i elsewhere. So far you can do this automatically with a handful of supported services like WordPress and Tumblr. There’s also an embed code available for manual “redistribution.” And Plinky has also added Twitter and Facebook Connect support, though these are case-by-case options that are available to you regarding individual prompts.
Overall Plinky is pretty easy to use, and its concept is quite reminiscent of a feature from a Six Apart blogging platform Vox promotes every day. Plinky founder Jason Shellen may be familiar with this, as he worked at Six Apart for a short while last year. But Vox encouraged users to create new posts by posing a new daily question. From there, you could easily see what other Vox users within and outside of your Vox neighborhood have written in response to the daily question. Shellen’s use of the daily prompt puts this feature into a microblogging format and elegantly creates content around it with minimal effort from the users.
The interesting part of such a format is the fact that you can follow users, or follow prompts. It’s a new way of creating and following content within a microblogging platform, and remains lighthearted and fun. I imagine incorporating some type of revenue-model into Plinky’s format could include indirect market research or sponsored prompts, among other options that aren’t readily available to other microblogging platforms.
What Plinky is missing, however, is a non-prompted option for sharing one’s thoughts or simply creating content. Perhaps this was a very intentional way in which to differentiate Plinky from similar services, but I think further integration with other platforms (i.e. email) and especially mobile devices will make Plinky more fun and more accessible to end users. Below is a video interview Robert Scoble did with Plinky.
