Is Plurk an Alternative to Twitter?
Posted by Nick O'Neill on June 5th, 2008 9:00 AMYesterday I spent an absurd amount of time exploring a new social media site called Plurk. The buzz started a couple nights ago when Leo Laporte tweeted out that sites like Plurk show that there is a lot of opportunity for innovation in the microblogging space. The end result was that thousands of users flocked to the site. Robert Scoble then popped up in my FriendFeed and I suddenly knew that there would be a bunch of people checking it out.
Not until I read a blog post by Muhammad Saleem yesterday on ReadWriteWeb did I decide to go check it out. I signed up and immediately started using the service which provided a whole new interface for the same thing that Twitter provides. The only difference is the way that conversations are grouped ultimately providing for much more dynamic conversations.
The majority of my conversation revolved around the act of “Plurking” but in the process I did notice that a lot of the people that I currently follow on Twitter are also on Plurk. One additional benefit of the service is the ability to share pictures and videos directly from within the service. Two other interesting features of the site are karma points (which grade you for your volume of activity on the site) and the reply conversations which show replies grouped together.
The real question here is how many of the microblogging solutions can we really use? I jumped on the opportunity to add a lot of friends and since then I have close to 200 but that’s really not the important thing. Are we all just testing out these systems as early adopters or are we choosing to help build the user base of the ones we like? As far as I know Twitter was sufficient but once Plurk came along there were some things we liked about it.
I’ll keep trying out Plurk for a little longer but honestly I could live with Twitter alone. Have you tried out Plurk? Do you see much value in using the service?
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The Karma points are interesting, but ultimately I don't really care about that kind of thing when it comes to a communication medium.
I like that people are innovating and I appreciate much of what Plurk is doing, but in the end, the whole point of micro-blogging/micro-communication is that it's quick, simple, easy. Plurk just feels a bit bloated to me.
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for now, i would consider myself an early adopter -- i jumped on the plurk bandwagon because i'm sick of waiting for a jaiku invite. we'll see where it all goes. and maybe i'll fall off the bandwagon before long. after all, i don't have a lot of time for sitting at my pc. i even BLOG from my phone. :p
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I also agree with chayaldora though that Plurk feels like a big chat room.
While I'm undecided about my use on Plurk, for the moment it seems to be interesting. I'll follow the trend as it happens and either pick up use or drop it to go back to Twitter.
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Plus, I didn't see too many high level conversations going on... yet. It seems mostly a slew of global early adopters (heavy on the teens/twentysomethings) chitchatting about... um, er nothing much. :)
We'll see, but I imagine Plurk could reach the tipping point with a certain demographic sooner than later because of the many cool features. I just doubt I'll be there ... much.
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