The Question of Plurk

Twitter has been twacked lately - in twubble - whatever one wants to term it. It has grown by serious leaps and bounds over the past few months, and seems to be reaching the point, as my Grandma used to say, where its eyes are bigger than its stomach. The Twitter stat blog does not shed much light - the most recent information is from March 14, 2008 and concerns the SXSW conference - which is probably the event that catapulted Twitter into the ionosphere of popularity - you remember the whole Saracuda debacle that hit all of the newsfeeds.

Anyway, we have been seeing WAY too much of the Whale recently - the one that informs us of Twitter's having "exceeded" its Tweet capacity, and asking us to kindly return later. When it works it's been slower than the bell on the last day of school. This is problematic for a lot of folks who use Twitter as a source of inspiration, agitation, investigation or recreation over the course of their workday. Laura Fitton wrote a beautiful description of the Village of Twitter, and the way this service has transformed the @home workplace for many people around the world. When it works, that is.

So with Twitter frustration reaching a peak over the past several weeks, people have been looking at alternatives. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to score an invitation to Jaiku. People have taken a hard look again at Friendfeed, which is more of an aggregation service for many of the other web 2.0 networks, and not really the same thing.

On Monday, Twitter was all abuzz about Plurk, so I decided to give it a look. I joined in a flash, and in seconds was posting "Plurks" to the horizontal timeline that made it easy to see 1) who was saying what when, and 2) who was saying what in response to the original plurk. In no time, I had added 50 "friends" from Twitter, then friends of friends, and before I knew it my timeline was ablaze with plurks.

Too ablaze. It was overwhelming. Impossible. My head was swimming.

Plus, it seemed to be reading "backwards" - the timeline moves right (older) to left (newer). Since we read and write left to right, it seemed odd. WTF?

I had jumped in too far too fast. Wayne Sutton was one of my first friends, and asked me if I had read the "safe-plurking guide". Of course, being chromosomatically averse to "directions", I had not. Nor had I read Plurk's FAQ. I had jumped in and begun playing and posting, and now was finding that there was just WAY too much conversation to keep track of. Time to scale back, and see what the real possibilities are for this service. I had found the way it was NOT going to work.

Everyone seemed to be at about the same place. Wayne Sutton was asking questions and trying to make sense of it. I followed his lead and started doing the same thing. Here is what we found. Following is a cool skitch graphic from Wayne.

There are a lot of things to LIKE about Plurk.

And here is another one from Wayne:

If you're interested, here's a link to all of Wayne's Plurk Screenshots. Way cool. The dude is good. But we knew that already.

I also like the way that on Plurk one can ask questions, and everyone who follows can see the thread, the timeline and what others have said in response. You don't have to be a follower or friend to respond. I asked followers on Plurk what they liked, disliked, and what they perceive as the essential difference between Twitter and Plurk. To make it even easier to see, I can reduce the noise by asking the timeline to show only "my" Plurks and relevant responses. Screenshots follow:

 

 

And like anything, one gets from the service what one puts in. If you want to use Plurk to *flirt*, there are a number of people who will be more than happy to float your boat. There is much more of this going on at  Plurk than at Twitter, and it is much more suggestive. The political discussion has a harder, more polemical edge to it. All in all, much of the chat seems much less  business-oriented, and more "social" - with all of the concomitant norms and standards of behavior - or lack thereof on the part of some. As one said, Twitter is work - Plurk is the party!

As on Twitter, one can "unfollow", but there is no way to "block" those whom you find offensive.

There are some other curiosities as well. Plurk awards "karma" based upon the number of people you invite, your followers and other criteria. At higher karmic levels, you have access to cooler emoticons, like dancing bananas and lips that make kisses. It definitely gets competitive, and you find yourself looking for ways to increase your karmic  footprint.

That's when you get in trouble. It seems one of Plurk's flaws is that you need to have a lot of friends and followers to have interesting or well covered conversations, yet if you follow too many your timeline will drive you batshit crazy. Right now with 42 "friends", I have 61 unread Plurks. Wayne Sutton has 255 friends - I can only imagine what his timeline screen looks like. Thankfully, it does have a "mark all as read" button for those who tend to OCD.

One potentially VERY cool feature is that Plurk has the ability to add "cliques", or interest groups that have only people associated with a cause, a particular business, an idea. This has been the one thing missing from Twitter that I think has the potential to be a HUGE plus for Plurk if they pull off the execution well. We have needed a way to distill and aggregate similar ideas and threads and populations. Imagine a "clique" with only your company's employees. Or one of local Obama supporters. You could move easily from there to the "world" to ask a question, then back to your clique with the answer.

All in all, Plurk is still evolving and finding its voice. People are coming up with ways every hour to make the service more useful. Leading the way is, once again, early-adopter and my hero Wayne Sutton. Here's a link to the suggestions; the page is too long to post here! Users are figuring out the ways to use their cell phones, link to pics and stories, and generally make the service more useful and less a waste of time.

Brand new suggestions include using the Plurk timeline as a reminder service for appointments or for post-it style notes. I suspect we'll see more as innovative people begin to use Plurk and develop fun add-ons like a Plurk summize or Plurk-local. Someone is going to have to develop a Wikipedia guide to the vocabulary that is growing exponentially. Whoever heard of a plurkgasm before yesterday?

To summarize: By all means, jump in start to plurk. The only way to add friends for now is to take your name out of your plurk homepage, and type in the person you want to find. For instance to find me, remove your name from your Plurk homepage and type in frankmartin. Most Twitterati are keeping the same user names (except someone apparently hijacked "Scobleizer"), making it easy to find your Twitter friends.

Just be careful about adding followers and following - follow those whom you are sure will be saying things you want to hear!

And as always, think of ways that Plurk can be used to advance our professions - I challenge you to make the most of Plurk for yourself and your family and your friends and your clients.

Use it to build. To create. To learn. To love.

That's REALLY what we're all here for, right? :-)

Comments

[Twila Marie]

As always, you wrote one more ROCKIN' post! Great work! I owe meeting you to Twitter, but I think I may owe "knowing" you to Plurk. Keep on PLurkin!

[Ginny]

This is the best analogy I've seen in a while:

"When it works it's been slower than the bell on the last day of school."

And you're right on, Wayne Sutton is fabulous in many regards. Awesome summary of Plurk thus far. You're an excellent writer. Love the doses of wit you injected to carry this long explanation along. Thanks for helping me understand Plurk a little bit better. So far it has just been driving me crazy, but with "twubble" Twitter has been in lately, I am open to the idea.

[Wayne Sutton]

Wow, this is a great review of Plurk. Thanks for the compliments and links. You're my hero too!

As time permits, I'm going to try to use both twitter & plurk. I see them as two separate communities. To me Twitter is more tech and mature, Plurk is more fun and new. But I do see Plurk with some advantages with features but not I'm not sure in the end will Plurk be used as a serious conversation platform because of the interface and "fun" aspects of it; such as Karma and smiles.

Either way, I'm excited about Plurk and look forward in participating and watching it's growth.

Wayne

[Marcello del Bono]

Well, the italian twitosphere has been boringly spammed recently about plurk, so I was annoyed and I decided not to try it. But this is a great review and I probably will end with giving it a look. I am also now following wayne sutton on twitter

[Darin R. McClure]

am very much digging Plurk and have been drawn there when twitter has been down, and then some. The iPhone version is fully boss, I almost like it better than the normal version of Plurk... great post.

[Ann Handley]

Good post! I just spent some real time with Plurk today, for the first time. I like it well enough, but there are parts of Twitter I like more. As I said on Plurk today, Plurk and Twitter are like my kids... with strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes, I'd like to take the best of both and mash 'em up!

twitter.com/marketingprofs
plurk.com/annhandley

[Maria Palma]

Frank,

Thanks for a very thorough review of Plurk! I was seeing all the buzz about it and have been a little hesitant to join yet another service, but if Twitter continues to have its spasms I may just give Plurk a try...

[Dave Delaney]

Great post Frank! If youre still looking for a Jakiu invite please let me know. I have a few, so if anyone else reading this would like one please shoot me an email.

Cheers,
Dave

[Cheryl Smith]

Frank, Im so glad to read your post. I started with Plurk over the weekend but found it more complicated than the amount of time I had to invest to learn. One thing that never became clear to me until just now was how to find friends. Thats a huge help.

Good post. Itll be interesting to see if the Plurk infatuation goes away when (hopefully not if Twitter becomes more reliable.

Best,
Cheryl

[Jim Spencer]

Frank, Thanks for the write up.

I am one of the idiots with multiple online handles and chose to switch between Twitter and Plurk. Not sure why.
The lack of a search feature on Plurk is whacky. The user interface / usability takes a lot of getting used to. I still like Twitter, but willing to try new things. I hated Twitter when I first signed on.

http://www.plurk.com/user/jbspartners
http://www.twitter.com/fairminder

[JP Micek]

Great overview Frank. Helpful to see the little tricks. From what I've heard from peeps (& tweeps) is Plurk is down almost as much as Twitter has been.

With $15-mil in new financing, I think we can look for Twitter reliability to increase very soon. In fact, it seems to have gotten better over the last five or six days. Time will tell.

Thanks again for the great overview.

@JPmicek

[Jessica]

Informative Plurk post. Thanks. Is it possible to import people from Twitter?

[Connie Reece]

Great review, Frank. The problem I see with cliques is that it is really just a group messaging feature -- and only the person who establishes the clique can use it. You could include me in a clique, and I could respond to any message you send to the clique. But I could not initiate a message to the clique.