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Exploring the Uncharted Lands of Plurk
By Dave Peterson | June 1, 2008
Sunday morning Leo Laporte started sending out messages on Twitter about a new social media micro-blogging site called Plurk.com. Leo is currently the most-followed person on Twitter, so as many, many people went to check the site out, Plurk got a serious trial by fire, and on the same day that they were moving servers. Some timing! Availability of some features and access to the site as a whole varied for different people throughout the day, but generally, I’d say they did well under the stress testing.
Plurk is a site like Twitter or Pownce that encourages its users to leave short messages about what they are doing, thinking, etc. Like Pownce, responses can be made to individual messages and separate threads form. Unlike Twitter, the messages are displayed in a horizontal, scrollable, timeline:
Another unusual aspect is the “qualifier”, an optional, selectable verb that precedes your message, like this:
Throughout most of the day, people familiar with Twitter have been poking and prodding Plurk to figure out how it works. It’s easy to get started, but it seems to have a lot of lightly documented aspects ripe for discovering. For the seriously geeky, this discovery process adds to the fun. There’s a pretty good FAQ, but a certain amount of trial and error is involved in determining similarities and differences to other like-purposed sites.
Interestingly, the mobile version looks quite a bit like Twitter, which might make it a more friendly way to experience Plurk, if the timeline puts you off. My major wish as of now is that finding other users could be easier. The best way at the moment to find people you may know from Twitter is to try their Twitter name in the URL and see if they are on Plurk, and are using the same name.
If you’re addicted to micro-blogging, and are becoming increasingly nervous over Twitter’s capacity issues, Plurk is worth checking out (at least until we crash it, too).
Topics: Web |
June 2nd, 2008 at 4:07 am
It was neat/cool….but like real blogging…and being immortal….there can only be one.
Otherwise, it is a pain sending the same updates to difference services and having an overlapping set of followers, etc. Or trying to keep them completely separate.
Or it could cross into like IM…where you subscribe to different ones to only hear from people you want to hear from…but otherwise never use it anymore.
I hover between 6 and 7 IM clients at the moment….left one network recently when I realized none of the people I had invited had ever joined me on it. Want to leave another because there’s one person that won’t stop interrupting me at work, and there’s no block capability….except it is currently the service of choice for my brother.
Not sure how it works that other people pick one that they use and no others, and I end up having to be on all of them….