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Plurk July 11, 2008

Plurk is the latest entry in the world of “microblogging”. Honestly, I’d never heard the term until I came across this article comparing Plurk and Twitter. The thing is, Plurk isn’t a direct competitor to Twitter. They’re both “microblogging” apps, but when it comes to what you can do with them they’re radically different.

On Plurk can actually have a real conversation. People can respond to a question you asked months ago, and it will make sense because posts are threaded like any good forum. A delayed response isn’t just some random message out of the blue that leaves you going “Huh? What’re they talking about?” On Twitter even a 20 minute lag can leave heavy posters going “huh?” And, as far as I can tell, it’s impossible to hear someone’s response to a question you post on twitter unless you happen to “following” the person who wants to respond, which means there is absolutely no point in posting engaging questions to discuss with strangers, because even if they do respond you’ll never see it. How crazy is that? What kind of social networking app doesn’t allow you to be social with anyone new?

[Update] Aristotle helped prove me mostly wrong about this but the implementatino is still stupid. Twitter doesn’t put @replies to you on your main page. They’re under the replies tab only, and it gives you no obvious indication that anyone’s sent you one. And, it only sends you an IM of posts of people you’re following but NOT any of the posts people make that are specifically for you. I’ve been getting replies for months now and never had a clue because Twitter made no effort to tell me. Epic FAIL.

Then there’s the social aspect. Plurk has hit a freaking home run with this. When it comes to finding new and interesting people you can watch everyone’s posts, just like Twitter, or you can tell it to show you all the plurks from women over 25 and living in Cambridge Massachusetts…. well, what would you expect? Actually, I don’t limit it to Cambridge, but there are actually enough people on Plurk now that that brought up posts from a handful of people in the past few hours. Now, if only profiles included a gay/straight/bi/omni option that I could filter on. I’m kind of glad it doesn’t let you filter on the Single, married, etc.. field otherwise there’d be too many people trying to hit each other up for dates.

Anyway, the point is, Plurk’s got a much more engaging UI. It’s far, far better for meeting new people, or even just helping to find people more like you. Just filtering on age and gender can make a huge difference in the types of posts you see. For example, while I’m fine with teenagers, I generally don’t want to see their posts unless they happen to be related to me.

And that brings me to your profile page on Plurk. At first, it looks a little useless, just a timeline of your past posts. But, once you find some interesting people to follow all their posts start showing up on your timeline (like your twitter profile page only better), and if you comment on someones post that you’re not follwing, the other replies to that post will show up in your timeline too. So, the more you use Plurk the more interesting it becomes.

Plurk also has a concept of Karma. The better your karma the more features open up (mostly little things like emoticons and screen names and such). It’s like a carrot to keep you using it, but it’s also a stick because bad karma takes those away, and I’m sure that, if they need to, they’ll implement some real negative penalties to hinder bad people.

Personally, I’m not a heavy “microblogger” You’ll never see a “getting my shoes shined” tweet or plurk from me, (actually I rarely microblog) but I do enjoy the voyeuristic aspect of seeing the occasional posts come in on my IM from the lives of interesting people, like Sara, who I’ve never spoken with but seems like a really interesting person from the snippets of her life she sends out as tweets.

In short, I’m giving Plurk two big thumbs up. It’s everything Twitter wishes it could be, and more. Here, have an invite.** It’ll probably set you up to follow my occasional plurks. Which, if you’re reading this, you may be interested in. If you’re already on Plurk you get one guess what my screen name is.

Side note: Unfortunately the ability to receive plurks over IM seems to be disabled at the moment (July 11 2008) while they upgrade it*. I think receiving them via e-mail is still good. There are a couple Adobe Air desktop clients people have made (Plurkit and PlurkAir) if you’d like IM-like interaction without going to the web page. I recommend the former.

* Twitter’s IM service has been either completely or partially broken for ages now, and Twitter sucks without IM. Plurk’s actually interesting with it’s web interface.

** If you do sign up, be sure to let it walk you through the UI, if for no other reason than to see how well such a thing can be done.