Shouts and Whispers

Rejaw differentiates between sending out 'shouts,' which go out to all of your followers as well as the public timeline, and 'whispers,' which are direct and private messages.

At the bottom of the page, you can always see if there are any new 'shouts' or 'whispers' and clicking on those links will take you directly to the appropriate pages.

As is to be expected, every conversation on Rejaw also gets its own permalink and Rejaw also provides RSS feeds for all conversations.

Payloads

One very cool aspect of Rejaw is that you can just post links to images (we tested this with jpg and png files), YouTube and Google videos, as well as mp3 and flv files into your posts and they will immediately appear in a mediaplayer in your timeline. The team behind Rejaw is also responsible for Lingr, which uses the same technology at the back-end.

API

Right from the start, Rejaw offers an API to developers who want to integrate the service into their own tools.

Verdict

So how does Rejaw stack up against Twitter and its brethren? In trying out the service for a while this morning, we really enjoyed the immediate interaction with others on the site. We only noticed one minor bug with regards to deleting already posted messages on the site, but otherwise, the service feels extremely well thought out already and we didn't experience any other issues in our tests. We especially liked how easy it was to embed videos, pictures, and audio into the posts and comments.

If you would like to add me to your friends on Rejaw, you can find my profile here.

If you think about the basic functionality, all micro-blogging sites offer more or less the same. You can create an account, add some friends, and then message back and forth (privately and publicly) and share stuff with each other. What Plurk does differently is the user interface and the effect of this change reverberates throughout the site. Here are the major UI changes and their impact.

1. The Timeline View

Not everyone has been happy with it but changing the way the information is displayed was a bold move, and ultimately the right one. The new layout performs exactly as expected. The timeline scrolls left to right, with the most recent data at the left. You can control the timeline using the trackpad or the arrow keys. Since the messages are arranged in chronological order, and because sometimes people send messages at the same time, this view also let's you easily read a large number of messages at the same time.

2. The One Line Messages

Just like the timeline view, the one line message layout is such a simple idea that at first it's very easy to not even notice it. But take a second and you'll notice that Plurk displays the avatar, a qualifier, a message snippet, and the number of replies for the message, all on one line. Again this allows you to easily read or ignore a large number of messages based on who posted the message, what qualifier the user used, and how many responses the message already has. This way you can skip between messages as you deem important, rather than looking at conversations from a top-down view (like on Twitter).

3. The Red Flag Replies and Update Boxes

The best part of Plurk is the constant chatter. Once you log in and add some friends, it's hard to get away. The reason for this is the way Plurk announces new activity to you. Unlike other services where you have to go looking for replies, on Plurk, every reply sticks out like a red flag. Every time someone posts a message you can see how many people replied to it, and with one click, read all the replies like a threaded conversation.

First, because the replies clearly stick out, you are bound to check them fairly quickly after they are posted, and second, because every Plurk message that is posted gets it's own conversation page (where all the replies are threaded and easy to follow), more people are likely to reply to a message and start conversations. Finally, because your Plurk page isn't static, and tells you every time you have new replies or your friends post a new message, you are more likely to check out what other people are up to (although at times of high activity this can feel like a nag screen).

4. The Inline Attachments

This one is a twofer. It is a user interface improvement but it's also a feature. Unlike Twitter where you can just post link to media, on Plurk, whenever you link to a picture, song, or video, the media is immediately visible/playable from within the message and you can double click it to get to the original source.

5. And Everything Else

Finally, another great Plurk feature that most people forget about is that the design offers so much information but is never overwhelming or confusing to navigate. All the chatting and microblogging activity takes place above the scroll to encourage maximum engagement, while everything else (like user info and activity stats, friends and fans, and mobile links) is below the scroll and out of the way (I sometimes forget all that stuff is there).

Conclusion

That said, the problem Plurk faces is the exact same problem that Mixx faces. Though the site has a better service, they can't match the same number of registrations or activity as market leaders simply because of the first mover advantage. People either find it too complicated (it's not) or are too lazy (they definitely are) to transfer their entire network over to a new service. The problem is that no one wants to move to a new site unless their entire network of friends moves too. This means unless there is a mass migration, a majority of the people (though they are definitely testing it) won't stay with the service in the long term.

In fact, even though I really like Plurk, I don't use it as frequently as Twitter simply because all my friends are using Twitter more frequently.

You can friend me on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Many new services struggle to build a developer community around their platform. By being compatible with Twitter, though, Identi.ca's developer pool is now virtually identical with Twitter's developer community, which means that it is only a matter of time before Twitter clients like Twhirl, Snitter, or TweetBox will make posting to Identi.ca an option.

As Twitter is making it more and more difficult for some third-party developers to hook into its API by severely restricting the number of calls any given application can make within a certain time period, Identi.ca will probably see a lot more interest from developers in the near future.

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.