Two Slashes

To start, I’d just like to point out that it’s almost guaranteed that I’m not alone in writing an opinionated piece on the new Plurk service, but I figured it was at least worth commenting about, especially when you take into account the contents of my previous post on Twitter.  Even more interesting is that a great majority of the discussion on Twitter in the past day or so is “Plurk is good/bad/in need of help/”.

I decided to give Plurk a try for myself and see what, if anything, set it apart from my now-established Twitter account, or similar alternatives like Pownce or Jaiku.  And to be frank, I don’t think there’s too much going for it; just about everything Plurk has developed concept-wise can be replicated with the Twitter API and a few lines of code.

Your “home” page is taken up mostly by a large horizontal timeline showing recent ‘plurks’ (even more obnoxious than ‘tweets,’ I realize) made by anyone you’re following updates from.  Unlike Twitter, there are two stages of followers, fans and friends.  Fans get the updates posted by that other person, but without the harassment of a ‘Can I be your friend?’ e-mail.  Friends, of course, is self-explanatory.  The timeline is supposed to be ‘realtime’ in that you can click a plurk and see all of the responses…but for all that effort, Plurk pops up a small notification box that there are new replies and plurks for you to look at rather than just adding them.  (Why not just add them and color-code them according to freshness from the last page reload?)  The timeline is also poorly-responsive; it takes a few seconds to scroll over on my machine, and no doubt it will be even slower as people and plurks add up.

One of Plurk’s minor benefits is that they follow the unwritten “microblogger” rule – that is, 140 words maximum – but you can use one of their ‘predefined’ verbs to save a few characters and make sure the verb gets a colorful highlight.  Of course, this only helps if you find yourself constantly nearing the edge and looking for any way to get your character count down, or if you can be bothered to navigate the menu with your mouse.  Plurk’s commenting system threads the responses together, at least, to make for some slight semblance of organization without all the click-throughs (Twitterers, meet Quotably), which makes it a tiny bit more organized.  But this also means you fall out of the conversation entirely if you aren’t following the initial poster.

Plurk also finds a major shortcoming in the way some of the site features (well, not even features, just extra smiley faces and the like) are locked until you establish your presence on Plurk by way of the Plurk Karma system.  Essentially, Plurk will analyze your participation once a day, and assign you a value from 0 to 100 based upon your interactions with the site and other users.  Making new friends or posts, or even uploading a profile picture all affect your Karma score.  Now, it’s an interesting way of getting people involved, but when it requires you to post nearly constantly to change the Plurk logo (yes, logo), I think it’s safe to say that there’s too little thought put into it.  Emoticons aren’t a big reason people are going to stick around…

Plurk also lacks an API and any semblance of SMS support (for the moment, at least), which means that you have to keep the page open or sign up your IM account (thankfully, they at least offer more than Google Talk).  And speaking of IMs, any updates to the timeline also get IMed to you, including responses from people you’ve never met, so if you’re following anyone who gets a lot of attention, your IM client will be getting a bit of attention too.  You can turn them off with off and on commands, post plurks, and respond to the nine or ten most recent comments on other plurks, but there’s really no use otherwise.

I’m sorry, but a headless dog does not a microblogging site make.  Plurk, it’s a great shot…but you’re going to need to offer something that can’t be replicated in thirty seconds on Twitter.  Oh, and lose the comment about emo-ness on your homepage.  Emos never share their emoness.

In the meantime, you’re welcome to befriend me on Plurk, but don’t expect any activity until (updated as of June 3) as Plurk has joined Twitter and Pownce at Ping.fm or some other multi-updater.

Alright, the emo joke might be a bit over the top, but I’m not the only one.  There are plenty of tweets about it, if only I hadn’t lost the URLs.