banannie

There’s a new kid in Social Network Town. Plurk exploded onto the scene over the weekend when Leo Laporte gave it a shoutout on TWiT Live. I first heard about it from Mike Gaines as we were getting ready to record the latest Push My Follow on Sunday evening, and I think I’ve wasted spent at least 10 hours playing with it already.

Plurk at first glance appears to be very much like Twitter, but don’t let the first glance fool you. In fact I think it would work quite poorly as a microblog, where you would simply post status updates. Plurk is all about the conversation. Plurks appear on a horizontal timeline that places new updates on the left (counter-intuitive but it seems to make sense.) Click on a plurk to read or add replies to that plurk. Conversations stay together, and there’s even a link to a stand-alone page for each conversation. Plurk also offers a mobile interface that works well for those who prefer vertical plurking. You can embed photos from Flickr or videos from YouTube, and a number of people have mentioned that they’d love to embed videos from Seesmic or Phreadz as well.

Things I like:

• The horizontal timeline. It’s fun and different.
• The randomness of conversations.
• The ease of replying. It’s insanely simple to click on plurk after plurk and post quick replies.
• You can friend people without having to follow them in the regular timeline. Twitter has this feature for IM but not for the web interface.
• Smileys. But I’d love to be able to add my own .

Things I want:

• More screen real estate for plurks. The profile information at the bottom of the page takes up too much space unnecessarily.
• Easy back and forth between thread pages & timeline view (tabs? This could be perfect for an AIR application via API.)
• Ability to use “cliques” to follow as well as post.
• A way to mark threads you want to watch, and a way to remove threads you aren’t interested in so you don’t see replies.
• Popup boxes that you can drag around the page (hat tip Phil Campbell!)
• Private message notifications, either on the site or via email (or both!) Just a little number in the corner showing there are messages waiting would work fine.
• The ability to block others on a per-user basis.

Things I don’t like:

• The name. Although it is starting to grow on me.
• Karma. You add to your Karma by inviting friends or posting lots of plurks, and probably some other ways as well, and higher Karma is rewarded with new smileys to post and the ability to add more information to your profile. It seems unnecessary and while it may encourage high usage at first, it won’t do much to keep people around in the long run.
• The headless critter logo. Yes, you can change it on your page, but it still shows up on the main page and as the Plurk Buddy’s image on IM. What the heck is that thing?
• It sucks time like a sponge!

If Plurk catches on as a conversational and crowd-sourcing center, which I think it might, Twitter may devolve back into what it was originally meant to be- a microblog or status updater. I use Twitter for both purposes now, but I don’t really see Plurk as as place for status updates- unless of course I want to have a conversation about my status, which is sometimes the case!

A few people have asked if I intend to abandon Twitter for Plurk. Twitter has had it’s technical problems lately, but I assume those will be resolved. Once that happens I see myself using both Twitter and Plurk going forward. But, like the rest of these social networks, it’s about the people, not the platform. I’ll be where the people are!

(currently I’m limiting my contacts to those I already know from elsewhere, but if I know you feel free to add me as a friend on Plurk!)