TinyChat is a nifty tool that provides a platform for chatting with Web cam integration and it has seen steady popularity with the advent of Twitter because of its easy dissemination on the microblog and straightforward user interface. Now, the company behind it has taken its functionality and expanded it further, adding various social networking and messaging aspects with a new service called Plank.ly.

In addition to its video chatting capability, Plank.ly integrates an interview type of platform similar to Formspring or Quora where it lets people online who want to ask you questions a site to do so. They can do so by either customarily typing in their questions or they can record a video of them asking their question/s through the service.

Users and their friends can rank an unanswered question up or down and the service will sort them according to positive votes, a feature comparable to Digg. Aside from signing up directly with Plank.ly, you can also log in using your Twitter or Facebook login credentials.

Once logged in, you are provided a profile page which you can set to be private, allowing only your friends to view its contents. Here, you can receive, sort and answer your queue of questions.

In a nutshell, Plank.ly still takes after TinyChat, but the inclusion of features makes it more like UStream lite. By directing them to your profile page, you can chat with them, answer questions in real-time. It offers a far simpler yet full featured way to engage with your followers in various ways at a more personal and interactive level.

Tags: Chatting, Digg, Formspring, New Service, Plank.ly, Quora, social networks, TinyChat, Tool