Peppery’s Blog

For most of the afternoon today, I’ve been playing with a service called Plurk (which sounds dirty). At first, I didn’t like the look of it but Tim eventually persuaded me to give it a shot. So I did …and loved it. The idea is pretty much the same as Twitter, however it is executed very differently. Rather than having a list of tweets, they’re all put on a Timeline.

A plurk is a “short, digestible message” which “allows you to showcase the events that make up your life”. Every plurk starts off with a qualifier, which is a colored word which are commonly used on the site. Of the different words you start your plurk off with something you feel, think, love or were doing at the time. Of course, you don’t have to start off with a qualifier, you can go “freestyle”. You can also filter your timeline/contact messages by qualifier. Personally, I don’t find them all that useful but they are quite fun.

A major difference between Twitter is that after you “plurk” your friends are given the option to comment directly on it rather than spam everyone else by replying to it in their feed. After a response is placed it shows up in your notification area. This sort of turns the site into a forum/chatroom. It’s quite fun to “talk” to people via responses and I feel it gives a great sensation of community. The site is heavy in AJAX which gives it a very nice “seamless” feel.

However, I can foresee issues with this feature especially with high volume tweeters/plurkers as with every comment on one of your friends, it ends up in your notification area. For most of my friends, I usually like it but other times I simply don’t care what they’re plurking about or there are a huge number of comments on it. They could change this by only allowing you to turn off notifications for certain plurks or users or a setting that only notifies you on plurks you’ve responded to. Other than that I think that I think the idea of responses to entries is great as I hated @replying to people on Twitter in fear of bugging all my followers.

Plurk seems to address common issues with Twitter. Plurk was designed to be a scalable messaging system from the start, unlike Twitter, and it seems to have addressed load issues extremely well for a service has barely been open to the public for a day. Another thing that I thought was executed well was the friends system, for example I can group friends up and send a message specifically to that group which I could see as becoming extremely handy.

This service is not without its negatives though. Users are rewarded karma for their activities throughout the site. The more your plurk, respond and invite friends, the more karma you get. I personally don’t like this as it creates somewhat of a popularity contest throughout the site. In return for your karma, you can unlock such features as more emoticons, a “star” next to your name and other things like changing your display name. In theory it’s a good idea, provide users with an incentive to be active on the website and reward them for it which (eventually) will translate into more advertising revenue and more money for Plurk. The problem I have with this is that you’ll find users who will abuse the site to boost their karma ranking by doing things such as spamming or creating doppleganger accounts which generally ruins the experience for other users.

As Plurk is only freshly out of private beta, there are still quite a few bugs to be sorted out. A rather big downside for me is that they don’t have an API or mobile features yet. I enjoy having select friends messages texted to me from Twitter. Overall, I think Plurk is an extremely interesting service and definitely recommend it.

If you are going to sign up to Plurk, please use my URL! I get credit (”karma” - yes, I know) for doing so.

_{Also, I was going to post something non-tech related here, but I kinda got carried away on the Plurk thing. Hehe. Enjoy.}