Just a few minutes ago, Mozilla released the much anticipated 3rd installment of Firefox – arguably the better browser out there (that’s a Mac user saying that!). The idea of announcing a FF3 Download Day was great in terms of awareness in media and blogs and incentivating downloads with a 24hour record attempt is something nicely viral indeed.

Unfortunately, as it looks at this minute, Mozilla wasn’t really prepared to satisfy the traffic they would cause with this. The site is unavailable and the FTP server doesn’t let in any more users. Bummer and almost a rookie mistake. Nonetheless, I’ve tried the release candidate for a few weeks now and it’s definitely worth making your window, door, handle and key to the Webworld.

I’m amazed once again how fast new services can get attention in these Twittertimes. Just yesterday, as it appears, a new microblogging service called Plurk.com started to make waves among the German Twitterati, half of my “following”-list registering right away and starting to play. Judging from other blog posts, Plurk seems to have been around since January, more recently opening up from closed beta, or so.

Plurk has something of Twitter (140 character messages, followers, friends) and Friendfeed (direct comments to “plurks”) and even allows for image and video embedding. The timeline displayed in the browser moves from left to right with most recent entries on the left. Each plurk indicates if it has responses. You can keep your plurks private or create “cliques” to have closed group plurk-parties.

Whether this service will take off or not is not the big question to me, it may, it may not. But it’s definitely a proof that there are more ways to visualise social-messaging-timelines and a great example for the viral mechanisms of the social web. Take a few key Twitterers (high follower numbers) and give them a new toy to play with – others will follow. Quite simple.

UPDATE: Cool, I was faster with this post than Mashable. Which really means something (just kidding)