Plurk "Overlord" Loses Control of His Own Blog Hype

The best thing with which to mock a company that shouldn’t exist is a company that doesn’t actually exist. And San Francisco’s Internet hipsters won’t just snicker about your start-up behind your back; they’ll do it where your vanity Google Blog Alerts will find it. Plurk is only the latest target–a start-up that lets users post short updates to the Web, as Twitter does, but adds a timeline. Plurk’s faux nemesis: Pheltup, “the first social network that not only tells you WHO is doing WHAT; but also WHY.” When some Twitter “thought leaders”–Pheltup’s target market–fell for the rumor that it had acquired the freshly hatched Plurk, it just showed how easily pranked the neophile cool kids of the Web are. What upped the ante is that Plurk’s real executives are now actually responding to the (fake) buzz about their “crude and unwholesome” would-be owners.

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