Sometime in the past week or so, Plurk added a new search feature which enables users to search through all plurk on the site. For a site which makes it challenging to browse through entries by your friends, search is extremely useful. While the search feature does not currently enable users to subscribe to an RSS feed of a custom search, this new feature has made the site much easier to navigate.

This is one more step toward providing the full set of features provided by Twitter, which can’t seem to stay online as of late. Tamar Weinberg suggests that Plurk shouldn’t event be compared to Twitter though since it’s extremely noisy with their current timeline format. I think that with the addition of text support and alternative timeline views, we could have a new competitor to Twitter.

For the time being I am split between the two services but I have become increasingly attracted to Plurk as I receive many more replies for everything I write on there versus Twitter. You might even call me a plurk evangelist at this point given that I’m the second highest ranked plurker in Washington, D.C. I also appear to be the 354th highest ranked plurker overall.

Such an honor to be among the top ranks on plurk! Just as on other sites, I think the most important issue will be how to develop systems that most effectively cut through the noise. At this point it is no longer easy to track all the conversations on Plurk, FriendFeed, Twitter or pretty much any other site that I’m a member of. Have you found more effective ways for filtering through the noise generated by these new services?

Over the past few weeks there has been a pretty consistent trend of conversation in the blogosphere surrounding site downtime. One meme that frequently reoccurs is that “Twitter is Down.” Just last night Mike Arrington posted an error message from Twitter which said “We just lost a database about 5 minutes ago and this has severely impacted the site.” That doesn’t sound like to big of an error, right?

This morning when I woke up, the first site I checked out was Plurk. I might be a Plurk addict now but when I loaded the site, it wasn’t functioning properly. I couldn’t update my status and eventually I was prompted with the following error:

I was a little shocked that only 2 days after I started using the service, it was already having scaling issues. Twitter regularly has issues and back when MySpace became popular it was also down every few hours. If you provide a free and useful service, I’m beginning to think that reliability is not as important. While people become frustrated, with not having access to a site, they will still come back later and try again.

According to Compete.com, Twitter saw continued growth last month despite their substantial downtime. So do you think social media site downtime really matters or is it just a bunch of loud people complaining about nothing?

Yesterday 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?