Pillowfort is a new-ish social network with a charming name that gamers are starting to talk about, especially in the wake of Google+'s official death. (While it never caught on with the public, G+ had a strong fanbase of virtual world users.) Facebook and Twitter's problems with toxic users and bot manipulation remain epic, and Plurk, another social network with a cult following of virtual world fans, has been slumping in recent years. Will they prefer to help build a Pillowfort?
"It seems rather more locked down than Google," says Pillowfort fan, virtual world expert, and social media power user Patchouli. "It doesn't offer Google's +1 Likeish button, it doesn't do Events proper (though you can probably do blogposts listing events and tag them accordingly so that's a workaround), and it hasn't wound its tentacles throughout multiple services like G+ did. It's also lacking in anything resembling 'Social Search'. You can only look for stuff within Pillowfort. The only connections you can forge with other social networks are direct HTML links in your posts.
"A lot of this is probably a function of how much more work needs to be done to bring Pillowfort close to the standards we're used to in our other socmedia toolset. That and the fact that many social media networks enable cross-network sharing only through mutual contracts (and when these break down, it more often than not turns acrimonious at best - remember when Instagram links suddenly degraded from TwitterCards to obscure HTML links after Facebook bought Instagram out?).
"So in short, G+ refugees will be faced with not having a lot of things, but Pillowfort has core functionality that matches up quite well to what any service without a direct tie-in to the Google ecosystem can probably manage."
So that's what Google+ users can expect. For folks from other social networks:
Interest in Plurk plummeting
"It's more akin to early-era Tumblr than Twitter actually. For starters, posts can be much longer than Tweets, allowing more nuance in what one wants to say. There are actual tagging capabilities (hashtags are clunky and tend to interfere with the flow when used in posts)
"Also: the system has 'Communities', forums that allow like minded individuals to share relevant posts and discussions. This is reminiscent of LiveJournal and Flickr's implementations.
"And most important of all for many of the newest comers, it doesn't have an obsession with censorship. At the moment Tumblr is blocking a lot of posts using AI for 'adult content'... such as breastfeeding education, tasteful classical art and erotica, and overly skin-colored art. Pillowfort currently has a hands-off approach that is cracking down only on the worst offenders while giving people room to experiment. Not sure how scalable this will be especially once they throw the gates wide open with free registration, but there's no sign of such a decision coming soon...
"It also has Facebook's ability to restrict the scope of who can read your posts with more finesse than Twitter's "protected or not" or Flickr's 'four levels and age restrictions' Important to realize that many of these traits may not apply if account creation isn't paywalled and it explodes. But there's a possibility that it may stay like this and gentrify gradually into a modern-day WeLL. Either outcome feels okay to me."
So that's one take. I for one am pretty burnt out on Plurk, Twitter, and Facebook for sharing virtual world stuff, so I'll definitely keep an eye for signs of Pillowfort growth.
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