The end of Plinky

In my inbox, this morning, I found a note from micro-blogging David to Twitter's Goliath, Plinky. (Note follows.) In short, Plinky was a great platform that turned micro-blog posts from "I'm having tea with jam,"or "Rain sucks," into brief posts on prompts/topics of their recommendation. ("What landmark did you find disappointing when you saw it in person?" and "Could you live without a car for a year?" are two examples.) I was always pulling for Plinky because I found that by doing the Cawfee Tawk thing and saying "Here's a topic. Discuss." the tweets/posts/micro-blogs would be less navel-gazing and more open to discussion, perhaps with folks you didn't know. That, to me, was the real win for social networking sites, a few years ago - create groups around common topics. The concern for me, now, is that due to privacy concerns and such (many of which are quite reasonable), that aspect of the social web is being replaced by a virtual attendee list for any party you were going to have anyway. Interestingly, gaming seems to be one of those great open vistas for the social web, still. Playing games against people you don't know on XBox live, participating in discussions on EnWorld.org... All of these things speak to a level of comfort that our community have of (in a cautious and appropriate way) getting to know others.

Plinky's note follows:

Dear Plinky user,
For the last few months, Thing Labs (formerly Plinky, Inc.) has been focused on development of Brizzly, and we couldn't be happier with how things are going. As such, we've been able to spend very little time on our first product, Plinky. We've made the difficult decision to stop publishing new prompts altogether.
The last new prompt will be published Tues., April 6. We're not yet shutting down the site, so you can still answer any of the 400+ prompts we've published to date, or read other Plinky users' answers.
Whether you've answered all of our prompts, just one, or simply checked out other people's answers, we want to thank you for visiting and supporting Plinky. We put a lot of work into it, and we think it's a great site. At the same time, we feel we have much more to offer with Brizzly than we ever could have with Plinky.
If you haven't already checked out Brizzly, our social media reader that works with Twitter and Facebook, please visit and create an account today at http://brizzly.com/signup. Also check out the Brizzly Guide, our user-edited resource for learning about current trends and news.
Sincerely,
The Thing Labs team