Why Not Plurk?

Monday, August 4th, 2008
by BCK

I think it’s good that Steve Gillmor is using Identi.ca as his micro-blogging home.

That line came from a post by Dave Winer today, talking about the mess that had some out of twitter’s “collapse”, and the need to bring it all together. That line sent me off on the thought of, why not plurk?

Plurk rocketed onto the micro-blogging, twitter-replacement scene back in early June, and since then has been compared to myspace, and some figures have it slowly fading into the abyss of dead social networks.

And for a lot of people plurk is dead, most early adopters, and tech pundits who signed up for the service have seen a steady decline in their karma rating, many like Robert Scoble, Louis Gray, and Leo Laporte, are at or near zero. Most of them haven’t touched Plurk in weeks and are buoyed solely by people replying to old plurks they’ve made. So while plurk’s core community has grown closer, many of the tech gods and demi-gods have written it off and moved on in search of their twitter replacement. So what was it that turns people off to plurk?

1. Don’t like the Timeline Interface of it. Whether its the timeline scrolling sideways, or the threaded conversions, or any number of other things, people simply don’t like the look of plurk on first signing in. Usually this ties into number 3, and needing to spend time with it.

2. Lack of 3rd Party Support: This is actually the one complaint I have about Plurk at the moment. There is hardly anything out there that allows you to use plurk on the desktop. No killer twhirl like app, or even simple IM (its been down basically since the service started), there are a few AIR apps that hacked together the mobile UI (PlurkAIR and Plurkit). Probably the most promising thing for desktop integration is sadly windows only. Plurker a .net based app is currently in beta. As far as mobile usage goes its bleak, only option is reall the mobile UI.

3. Simply didn’t get over the hump: Chris’s quick visit turned into a debate amongst his plurk followers about why he didn’t like the service, and many of them brought up the hump. The hump is the period of time it takes you to get use to plurk, and get in the flow of it. When I first joined Plurk I wasn’t too fond of the timeline and the general look of it. I slowly started using it more, and by the end of the first week I was where we are now, a core user. I’m not going to stop anyone from using a service they don’t enjoy but I think many people would benefit from really digging into plurk for a week or so.

4. Karma system: At first the karma system is a unique thing that sets plurk apart, but after a while you see the side affects of it. Without a way of turning off karma, into somewhat of an out of office mode, it simply gradually goes down, until you return and post again.  I went on a 4 day vacation up to Maine and didn’t have access to internet, so of course my karma took a nose dive. Not only do you have to deal with the constant “threat” of dropping karma, you have to deal with potentially not having access to some of the site’s features (mostly related to plurk’s emoticons, though it can range to changing you display name to custom CSS)

If I were to leave Plurk at this moment, I’d have to label my reasoning as lack of 3rd party support and general inability to follow people I want to.

So why didn’t you choose Plurk? And what would it take for you to use it again? If you’re inclined to you can find and follow on plurk here.