With the Thing Labs team focused almost completely on Brizzly for the last several months, the company's ability to give attention to both their intriguing social media client and the product that preceded it, Plinky, the pushy prompt site, looks to have run out. In an e-mail to all registered users, the team said this week's prompt, one of more than 400 published to date, would be the last. While the site will remain active for the near term, it won't be seeing much attention going forward.When Plinky launched back in January of 2009, the concept was to inspire average social media users and bloggers to create new content "and look good doing it", as CEO Jason Shellen said. But the site didn't gain significant traction. Despite enticing a robust 28,712 registrations (as of 1 a.m. on April 7th), Plinky could not sustain traffic from their launch, fading to less than 10,000 visitors a month in the US, according to Compete.com.
Luckily for Thing Labs, Brizzly is a much different story, having sustained 100,000+ visitors each month for the last half-year, and recently adding a new iPhone application, at the beginning of March.
Plinky will be left open, for now, and the Thing Labs team didn't sound like they were trying to sweep the site under the rug with their note to users today, saying:
"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."You can see the company's official announcement on their blog, titled "An important announcement".