webrampage

Ever wondered if Twitter was the best or if it was Plurk? Well I did and I’m sure a lot of you did too. So here’s the ultimate showdown for Twitter and Plurk! Any ideas on who’s going to be the winner? Lets find out.

The looks

Looks are important. It works as a magnet. Well Twitter and Plurk both have a nice design. But, I like the Plurk layout over Twitter. I like the whole timeline idea. Its very unique, makes it easier to find your friend’s plurk and of course, the plurks show up in a chronological order (left: newest & right: oldest). While Twitter’s layout is a bit messy. I’m talking about the place where you see all your friend’s tweets.

Profile Customization

Plurk lets you customize your profile using CSS (but you need to wait until you get 25 Karma) and Plurk also comes with themes that you can choose from (noob-friendly!). Twitter doesn’t have that and you just get to choose what colour you want where (ex: background, sidebar, etc). And of course, both of them lets you upload your own picture for the profile.

So, yeah Plurk is both good for starters and experienced users (who knows CSS). You can really customize your Plurk profile while Twitter only lets you choose colours and a background picture (not so good).

How easy is it to make friends?

It’s really, really easy to make friends on Plurk. There’s a page with random users and you can just add them (if you find them interesting). It doesn’t take a lot of time and effort. Getting friends on Twitter is a bit hard. I got 57 friends on Plurk and 8 on Twitter. That explains a lot, huh?

How many friends reply/comment?

I just started using both Plurk and Twitter a few days ago. So, I don’t have a lot of loyal friends. But, I do get a few comments on my plurks while I got only one reply on Twitter.

Privacy options

Yeah this one’s for you privacy freaks. I don’t really care who sees my plurks or tweets (since they’re not personal). Okay there is a privacy option on Twitter that lets you choose to allow the people you follow see your tweets, only. Plurk has a bit more privacy options. You can setup who can view your plurks and who can search for you on Plurk.

Private Messages

Private messages are the messages you want to send to one specific friend. On Twitter you can send private tweets only to your mutual friends. On Plurk its looking a lot better. You can choose to send plurks only to your friends or a few specific friends. Great, huh? Plurk wins this round.

Incoming traffic

Yeah this one’s for the people looking for some traffic from micro-blogging. Well like I said I just started using them few days ago and I pretty much stopped using Twitter. I did get a bit more traffic from Plurk then Twitter. But, when I compared how many friends I have on Twitter and Plurk to the number of visitors coming from them, I saw that Twitter was more efficient.

Random features/things

• You can disable comments on Plurk.
• You write in 3rd person on Plurk most of the time (ex: th13rteen [thinks] if blogging about twitter and plurk will be good?). Awkward!
• You can tweet from your cellphone on Twitter.

So which one is the best?

Twitter: If you already have friends using it, if you have a nice community following you everywhere or if you’re successful on the web like Darren Rowse or Michael Arrington. And if you’re looking for some traffic!

Plurk: If want to micro-blog for fun, want to make a few buddies, be a bit more personal and build a profile.

Right now I’m using Plurk. I kinda stopped using Twitter, but I’ll put a bit more effort into it. So, I’ll be using them both with Ping.fm. I need to post a bit more links on Twitter than Plurk (that’s what everyone seems to be doing on Twitter).

So, go ahead and join Twitter and Plurk. And don’t forget to add me: Twitter & Plurk.

To the readers

So what do you think? Which one do YOU like better? Tell us about it. And hey, don’t forget to subscribe via RSS or email for more like this!

StumbleUpon (SU) is one of the coolest social bookmarking sites. You can really get some traffic out of this site. Today I’ll give you some tips that would help you get the most out of it. And I’ve specifically written this guide for blogs. But, you could use this guide for your forum too.

Stumbling other sites

I’m assuming that you have an account and have the toolbar installed. If not then go do that first. Okay don’t just start stumbling your own blog. Lets make it look legit and save your ass from getting banned by SU. So, go to some of your favourite sites and click on the “I like” button on your toolbar aka stumbling it.

Do that on about 2-6 sites. And make sure that you write a review on at least 2 sites. Make sure that the review is nice and not just some dumb shit.

Time to stumble your blog

Yeah now lets work on your blog. First pick a post (preferably a recent one) that you think is superb and would be useful to people. Bookmark that. Write a nice little review and try not to look spammy. Okay good. Don’t stumble all the posts. Just pick the best ones.

Adding friends

Add a few random people as your friend. And if you know people that use SU and has been a member for a long time then you just won the lottery. Add them right away. Ask them to stumble your blog and write a nice review.

Stumbling Networks

There are sites which are dedicated to stumble exchanges. Like people there will stumble you and in return you’ll stumble them. Smart bastards, huh? One of the sites that does that is StumbleXchange. And another one is BlogCatalog. You’ll find groups like this on BlogCatalog that exchange stumbles. You could give them a try. It’ll be worth it.

So that’s it for now. Have fun stumbling! And feel free to subscribe to my feed for more stuff like this. Or you can subscribe via email.

You know what an Alexa rank is, right? If you don’t then OMG! Don’t worry I’m just joking. Its basically a rank given to a site according to their traffic.

How Alexa gathers info

Maybe you don’t know about this. It calculates the traffic rank by monitoring the sites their users go to. But, what if a lot of your visitors don’t use the Alexa toolbar? Oh then your rank will be pretty bad. Their method of collecting traffic info sucks. There are probably better ways to collect it.

How to boost it

Its pretty simple. Just install the toolbar. Go to your site often and set it as your homepage. And also ask your friends to do the same. If you work in an office or school then install the toolbar on all computers and you know the rest.

Cybercafes! Go to a few cybercafes and make friends with the manager or owner over there. Make sure that they start to like you and stuff. Then ask them to install the toolbar on all computers and set your site as the homepage. If needed give them some money.

A really nice trick. Alexa doesn’t care about the IP. So take advantage of it. Make a stupid page on your site and code it to refresh it self every 30 seconds. Just get the toolbar installed and every 30 second it will count as a visit. And make sure that there is no AdSense on that page.

And of course, social bookmarking. Get people to digg or stumble your site. There are also other autosurf softwares, but I wouldn’t recommend you using them since Alexa could ban you and so will AdSense (they will think that you are trying to get fake page impressions).

Where it stops

Once you go around 100,000 you can’t use these tricks to go up anymore. You’ll need real traffic to increase it. There’s just too much competition around 100K.

And don’t really worry about Alexa rank. I’ll post about that later. And if you have any other tricks then feel free to tell us about them.

Update: Just to prove that this works, Whooked’s Alexa rank jumped from 800K to 300K. And so did my blogs. Not bad, huh?