Plurk: Unique or Just Another Twitter Clone?
Plurk, the latest lifestreaming service to make the rounds, certainly has one thing going for it - a sense of humor, albeit an odd one. The site is currently riding a wave of new registrations due to a mention from Leo Laporte, but is it worth your time or is it just another Twitter clone with a prettier UI?
This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
If there is one thing to love about the site even before you try it is that the service's name, which at first glance sounds stupidly web 2.0, makes perfect sense once you know what it stands for (one of the very few web 2.0 names that do). In fact, when I first heard the name I was ready to hate it, but after reading their explanation I couldn't help but love it.
- "Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk = Plurk
- Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
- Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
- Verb potential: "Oh I googled this -> Oh I plurked it" Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it's catchy, snippy and sweet."
How can you not love it?
As far as essentials are concerned, Plurk has all the bases covered. The service allows you to display 'events' in your life and follow other people's events by sending and receiving messages called Plurks.
These Plurks are almost identical in nature to Tweets (on Twitter). They are limited to 140 characters, they cover what is going on in your life (lifestreaming) and can be shared with others using a web or mobile interface or SMS (text-messaging). The difference, however, is the approach to sharing. While Twitter asks "What are you doing?", Plurk gives you some preset qualifiers to plurk with. These qualifiers include: loves, likes, shares, gives, hates, wants, wishes, has, will, ask, was, feels, thinks, says, is, and in addition to that you can free-style plurk (i.e., use it identically to Twitter, without qualifiers). These qualifiers are both a good thing and a bad thing. First, they are good because you are able to sort by qualifiers if you're looking for only one type of expressions from your network (for example, what have your friends liked in the past week, what have they hated, what are they doing right now?), but they are bad because they force you to write in third person, which I personally find quite annoying -- reminiscent of the old Facebook status format.
The User Interface and Experience
Signing up and using Plurk literally takes less than a minute (including registration and the starting guide). And once you start using it, some very interesting differences compare to other lifestreaming services start to become apparent. Right off the bat, the first thing you'll probably notice is that the UI is very pretty. In fact, the UI is absolutely brilliant, and you can't appreciate how great it is compared to other competing services until you add a dozen or so active friends and see how easily and quickly you can absorb all their activity (something that is rather clunky on other sites).
Plurk's use of the horizontally scrolling time-line to manage lifestreams (versus virtually every other service's vertical layout) is so smart that it feels like second nature and will make it difficult to go back to other less intuitive layouts. Furthermore, anyone who frequently lament Twitter's lack of threading and has found some comfort in FriendFeed, is going to love the threading mechanism on Plurk. You can look at any Plurk and immediately see how many replies it has gotten, thanks to a number at the end of each message. You can see all these replies and add your own (threaded chronologically) simply by clicking on that number. You can also scroll to the bottom of the floating message window and click the Plurk page link, which takes you to the full conversation page for that message and allows you to add your reply.
To add to the comprehensive user experience, Plurk allows you to customize your "Plurksperience" by adding a custom lifestream title and theme, post links, photos, and videos, has a mobile version of their site (not as pretty, but it works), and an embeddable lifestream widget.
Lifestream Networking and Network Management
The networking options on Plurk are enough to accommodate most people (in theory... in practice I couldn't import a friend list using any of the mechanisms, but it appeared to be a local problem). You can use email contact lists as well as instant messaging contact lists to import or invite friends. Once imported and after they have accepted your requests, you (and they) can determine different levels of access to your lifestream using the simple Plurk versus advanced Plurk options. Simple Plurks can be shared with everyone, your friends, friends of friends, or kept private (only you can see them) and advanced Plurks allow you to segment your friend list into different groups and Plurk by clique.
Other Interesting Twists
One of the things that is severely lacking on the social web is genuine appreciation of the communities that help the products or services succeed. While Plurk doesn't do anything significant in that department, it does give its users various levels of stars depending on how many friends they have recruited. This potentially serves as both a way for Plurk to show their appreciation, and give you an incentive to recruit more people (so that you can be seen with a star around your avatar).
The service also carries over a (perhaps outdated) concept of karma. The more active you and your friends are on the site, the more karma you accumulate. As you build karma, exclusive features become available to you.
Conclusion
When I first heard about Plurk I was ready to hate it. But after using the site and comprehensively going over the feature set and its implementation I am thoroughly impressed. Ultimately, I think Plurk is an amazing evolution over the previous generation of lifestreaming services that does almost everything you'd expect to find and does it better, while adding unique and interesting features of its own. Perhaps the only quibble I have with the service right now is that when I reply to someone else's Plurk that reply is restricted to that person's Plurk and doesn't show up in my lifestream otherwise.
You can friend me on Twitter, Friendfeed, and now Plurk.
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
What's up with the 140 character limit?
Posted by: djacobs | June 4, 2008 11:19 AM
@djacobs, it seems none of them yet figured how message concatenation is done via the SMS server X_X
Posted by: godie | June 4, 2008 11:57 AM
I love the timeline aspect of Plurk, but hate that is seems to scroll backward. It's the exact opposite of how I think. A few of my fellow plurkers have commented on this as well. But, I do like the threads and the cliques. Now, if only they had an open API, so I could download a client like I have for Twitter, it might start to win my heart...
Posted by: Brianne Pruitt | June 4, 2008 12:05 PM
Brianne, it makes sense to have it scroll backwards just so you can read it left to write and so that you see the most recent things to the left.
Posted by: Muhammad Saleem | June 4, 2008 12:15 PM
I do expect alot from it given that it has private plurks as well as the karma system as an incentive, initially. Thereafter I am not too certain about how long the conversation might last unless it is backed by some big social media names. With work, it will be better than twitter, which users complain about of recent(mobile down). Plurk, though lacking here and there, definitely has me hooked.
Posted by: AK | June 4, 2008 12:23 PM
OK, I've had enough of social networking garbage. Twitter is garbage and Plurk is garbage. Who really needs glorified Instant Messenger websites? They both just give us more reasons to put off getting work done.
What am I talking about though?... Twitter will probably get bought out for millions. I guess I'm just jealous.
Posted by: Project Swole - Weightlifting and Nutrition | June 4, 2008 12:42 PM
Wauw Plurk certainly is very much like the project I am working on. In some way its both very nice to see the proof of concept but on the other hand my project may end up being called a plurk clone?
That would be devastating since I never heard about plurk until a few days ago.
I still think there is a LOT of room for improvements though and I hope I can provide those.
Posted by: Rune | June 4, 2008 12:42 PM
So the $10M question, are all those people fed up with Twitter ready to move over to Plurk given how frustrated they claim to be?
Posted by: Bob Ngu | June 4, 2008 1:07 PM
Thanks for the well written and interesting post Mu.
When I first looked at Plurk, I did have the urge to make some type of Puke reference... The design put me off immediately.
But after taking a more serious look, I found lots to love (like their interesting karma system and timeline layout, which grew on me), so now I'm facing the daunting task of having yet another social media site to track. Hopefully Twhirl will aggregate Plurk into their AIR application.
Good luck to the Twhirl team! Great job thus far.
Posted by: ThinkingSerious | June 4, 2008 1:43 PM
This is sweet. Has more of a personality to it that other sites in a similar field, makes you feel more relaxed and more likely to post something.
Posted by: Ed | June 4, 2008 2:04 PM
@Bob Ngu: No, because they probably would be moving to Pownce. Maybe even Jaiku, but most of them wouldn't use plurk, because there is no mobile version and that's actually the worst part about it.
Yes, sure, it might be pretty and there are some cool tweaks about it, but hey, if the community would have wanted more feature, it would have moved to pownce when they launched. But they didn't. Why? Well, ok, sure, because they were using Twitter already, but the main reason was definitely the non-existent mobile support. Think about it, everybody is so happy about the cool AIR apps for Twitter. Guess what: Pownce had one right from the start. In 2007. That's like last year! ,)
It's all about the open API with Twitter and no cool, funky name with an idea behind it will change that.
Posted by: Igor | June 4, 2008 2:09 PM
@Igor, I don't agree that mobile support is *the* most desirable feature for Twitter and even if it is, it should be quite possible for any of the other sites to implement. Seriously, compare the importance of uptime vs. mobile feature, uptime is far important IMO.
Posted by: Bob Ngu | June 4, 2008 2:22 PM
Sure it is. It's all about the communication everywhere, anytime.
Posted by: Igor | June 4, 2008 2:32 PM
I am really into plurk, moreso that I was originally with twitter. Good chance that plurk has some real legs if twitter keeps having technical issues.
Plurk is CRAZY fast, and you feel like you're in a conversation more than twitter because of that speed.
Other features like threaded chatting (which also ajax refreshes) works perfectly as well.
If you're on it, would love the add:
http://www.plurk.com/user/miketighe
Posted by: Michael Tighe | June 4, 2008 2:37 PM
Igor,
You said "It's all about the communication everywhere, anytime." Well when Twitter is down, there is no communication, period, so uptime trump mobile access.
Posted by: Bob Ngu | June 4, 2008 2:52 PM
I'm going to have to get used to the scrolling feature, that is so not in conjunction with the wine I'm drinking right now.
Posted by: TeasasTips | June 4, 2008 2:55 PM
@Bob Ngu: Yeah, you're totally right about that. I hate that about them to, but I don't think they can't fix it. Sure, it will take some time, but in the end, there will be a solution.
And as long my peer group is staying on Twitter, I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, there are some people who are testing Plurk right now. We had the same thing with Pownce and Jaiku. There is a testing phase and then there the moving back. Maybe I'm wrong about Plurk, but I don't think so.
(Btw. I'm speaking about my view on the German community. That's something you should consider, I guess.)
Posted by: Igor Schwarzmann | June 4, 2008 3:13 PM
Igor, you nailed it on the head, I do believe that your social graph is what's keeping you and others like you on Twitter, it's simply more painful to migrate to another service, people rather tolerate and complain about the downtime rather than move.
I am no more a Plurk fan than Pownce or Jaiku. My question has always been if Twitter's downtime is so unbearable, why not move earlier to a competitive service? Because its too hard to move the social graph.
BTW, I wasn't purposely excluding the German community but good to know the tidbit about mobile access being a must-have feature.
Posted by: Bob Ngu | June 4, 2008 3:41 PM
Plurk, pleez put the head back on the animal. *sheesh*
Posted by: BarbaraKB | June 4, 2008 4:18 PM
You mention that you don't like the qualifiers that 'force you to write in third person' but I don't think you mentioned that there is the 'freestyle' option which means you can plurk whatever text you want, without the sentence having to start with a verb.
This is just a minor point in what was a great post. Thanks Muhammad!
Posted by: Matt Hooper | June 4, 2008 8:17 PM
I'd use it for the name alone. And the awesome interface. AND THE GOLD STARS!!
Posted by: nadhira | June 4, 2008 8:18 PM
It took me just a bit to figure out and appreciate, but I officially like Plurk better than Twitter. I hope it catches on (and they release an API asap).
Posted by: Scott K | June 4, 2008 8:40 PM
I signed up a few days ago. It's a little different but can't say I really like it. Twitter is still the place for me.
Posted by: Spuds | June 5, 2008 2:18 AM
What I love most about Twitter is the ecosystem built around it. I can't possibly think of going back to updating from the browser. I recently wrote a post about how much these tools improve our twittering experience.
http://sachendra.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/improve-your-twitter-experience-with-these-tools/
I'm not leaving my seat at Twitter till I can see a hint of this experience over at Plurk.
Posted by: Sachendra | June 5, 2008 4:03 AM
mmm, karma!!!
but i'm not leaving my twitter too ))
Posted by: Serg | June 5, 2008 5:17 AM
Use both people and I think both can co-exist and have a share amount of fans.
Posted by: Syahid A. | June 5, 2008 9:20 AM
I think it's a case of a service that would have been much better as an addon to twitter than a competitor. If anyone goes to plurk and thinks 'wow this is blazing fast', guess what it's cuz there is _nobody_ on it. The value of twitter is already in its userbase, not its featureset. Getting people to migrate to something like plurk is like getting people off of facebook..things like groups and other plurk features are something twitter could (and probably will) add pretty soon...so what would be the compelling reason to switch?
Certainly not for the wrong way horizontal scrolling interface...
Posted by: Yan Pritzker | June 5, 2008 9:39 AM
Well for me it is somewhat of a clone to twitter, but I like plurk's layout much better.
Posted by: Garrett Pierson | June 5, 2008 9:39 AM
I find the time-line function and ability to read specific threads very user-friendly and addictive.
That being said, I don't think it will replace my use of Twitter, but only time will tell.
Switching my mindset for how I want to write something between Plurk and Twitter has already become a bit of a challenge though.
Posted by: Derek | June 5, 2008 10:23 AM
Plurk is awesome! So much easier to follow whats going on and when it happened. Find and Follow me on Plurk at http://tinyurl.com/6ls8y4
Posted by: Zak Nicola | June 5, 2008 10:26 AM
Well I have gave Plurk a try and found is nice .. but still I think it will take some time for it to actually grow in popularity and user friendliness.
But I guess with changing internet habit we can expect somthing similar but revolutionary will take the place of twiter , myspace and all the rest which top the social netowrking arena today.
Jessica
Editor
http://www.212articles.com
Submit Free Articles
Posted by: Jessica | June 5, 2008 11:04 AM
I guess even though the site is unique on its own but if something was ahead of it first..we really can't avoid that it will be called clone or copy cat..^^
Posted by: Internet Marketing Joy | June 5, 2008 2:07 PM
I know that I am considering leaving twitter for good and permanently going over to plurk. http://webpoet.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/the-plurks-are-flying/
Posted by: Web Laureate | June 5, 2008 10:07 PM
Plurk sounds a lot better. But I'm sure Twitter's first mover advantage is going to be tough to beat.
Posted by: Ann Arbor Web Design | June 6, 2008 6:22 AM
Great update on plurk, thanks for the post.
Posted by: Scott Fillmer | June 6, 2008 7:13 AM
I'm enjoying plurk and have no complaints. Other than I WANT MORE KARMA :)
Add me up: http://www.plurk.com/user/status_girl
Posted by: Melanie Nathan | June 6, 2008 12:59 PM
Have signed up for days ago, looked so wrong..
But it is great! :D
I have totally forgot about twitter(and the SLOW everything)
The time line really boust you're creativity :D
Posted by: Phil | June 8, 2008 8:04 AM
I guess the 140 char was based on SMS type. Anyway I see plurk as a higher version of twitter. They really are innovative!!
Posted by: Paul Villacorta | June 10, 2008 2:53 AM
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you on that one.
Posted by: web design company | June 10, 2008 4:29 AM
join we together, for the public good.
Posted by: William Shakespeare | June 20, 2008 7:50 PM
another interested twitter clone script that allows you to run your own twitter clone: revou.com
Posted by: M Petty | July 2, 2008 11:04 AM
Even if it is just a Twitter clone, that may be what the world needs right now with Twitter's constant outages. Twitter is just another example of the benefit of being first. Pownce is better. It has more functionality. But it arrived later, so it was at a disadvantage. I haven't used Plurk yet.
Posted by: Ranked Hard | July 3, 2008 11:31 PM