Twitter today, Plurk tomorrow?
In the wake of the backlash from Twitter users over the constant downtime of the site there has been a quasi-exodus by some of the more popular twitterers to a new service called Plurk.
I was invited by a friend over twitter yesterday evening and tried it out. So far, I like the ajax based interface, but searching for people on the service is harder than it should be. There is a list of “interesting plurkers”, and a list of the newest people on the site. There are also options to recruit people from your facebook friends list and various e-mail address books. Unfortunately, as far as i could see, there is no simple way to just SEARCH for a person, which unfortunately limits the usability of the service. Also the networking aspect of it is pretty limited as well, as you do not have any way to see someone else’s full friends list, just a small group of random friends. There are a lot of people online that I communicate with through Twitter alone, and it makes it difficult for me to find these people on this service if they are on here.
As a twitter clone though, it makes a few improvements I’d like to see Twitter itself implement. The ability to either be a fan of a person, or a full fledged friend is extremely nice. Not to mention the ability to create “cliques” of people for different purposes, so you could message just people in your family, or just your close friends. It also supports in message displaying of embedded videos and pictures from a variety of different services. The ability to add an emoticon to the message is cute, but kind of useless, and the concept of “karma” where your score goes up if you’re a good citizen of the community is interesting, but we will see how it develops as the user base grows.
All in all it’s not a bad start. The timeline interface is nice, and makes it easy to track through messages in order, though its hard to tell what it’d look like if you have thousands people that you follow, but for small groups it works nicely.
Personally I think the simplicity of Twitter is its biggest strength and in it’s current state I don’t think that Plurk is going to take the throne of microblogging just yet. But that’s just my opinion. What do you think about Plurk? Feel free to give your opinion in the comments!
Also if you’re interested in trying Plurk out for yourself, Here’s an invitation for you!
http://plurk.com/redeemByURL?from_uid=10534&check=1065951130&s=1