Last weekend, something called “Plurk” was buzzing around in peripheral vision, but I was too preoccupied with personal health to really take it in. There was also something called Pownce which I did look at and sign up to. Looked nice, another social network microblogging thing, similar to Twitter, with maybe a couple of extra features.
Not wanting to jump ship from Twitter, I then cast around for a tool to update status on multiple services, and found, first, the Blog It app for Facebook, and second ping.fm, both good in their separate ways. Nothing really to get hyped over.
Yesterday, though, something (probably Romana) made me take a look at Plurk. Initially I was thinking, “here we go again; yet another twitter clone, another account to maintain”. Did I have the energy for this.
But you know what? Plurk is wonderful, addictive, and awesome in its execution. The developers have really thought this through, really understood what we the users actually need. What’s so great? Well …
1. Plurk provides the usual 140-character status update (a “plurk”), but presents it in an interesting way: plurks from you and your friends are shown left to right on a timescale, so you get a sense of when as well as what, which in itself is already a valuable advance on the competition.
2. Click on a plurk and you get a drop-down/pop-out box which allows friends and fans to add comments/replies to that plurk, which is a huge advance over twitter’s replies, in that it keeps messages and replies together. This makes it much, much easier to hold conversations, especially if you are having multiple conversations at once.
3. Better yet, the plurk comment box is very much like chat, or anyway like Facebook’s chat, in that it updates continuously as others post comments, so you can really get a community conversation happening. This is a quantum leap above twitter, and makes this possibly the next killer app for social networking.
Apart from that, Plurk is obviously a very well crafted piece of software engineering, making good use of web2.0-style techniques. Most things happen in the one place, with lots of pop-outs instead of changing windows.
Plurk is growing fast, but they seem to be holding it together so far in terms of scaling. Hopefully they can avoid the problems that Twitter has been facing lately. It’s not yet clear how they intend to make money, but a few possibilities spring to mind. Let’s hope they do, because this service is GOOD — the first (web) thing to really excite me in a long time.
