A Plurk Review From a Twitter User
As soon as I heard the name, “Plurk”, I thought, “Here we go, another Web 2.0 Media site with a daft name!” But then I registered and played around with the site and was immediately impressed. More than the impressive user interface (UI), I appreciated the humor that goes with the site make-up and especially when I discovered how the name was formed!
Plurk may do the same as what Twitter does, but it does it far better in my opinion – and I speak as a fan of Twitter who applauds their independent stance, which has so far kept them out of the hands of the likes of Google!
You get a text input box to type in your strictly limited 140 characters, you get to follow friends and persons of interest, and they you in return. All the “immediate” real-time updating that has become Twitter’s hallmark and differentiators from other social media sites is present in Plurk.
But what makes Plurk different is so very attractive and what separates it from Twitter.
The most impressive difference is the timeline which is used to show you exactly when a “plurk” (the same as a “tweet”) is made. You get a scrolling timeline which defaults to the current time being shown in the center of the screen – as time progresses, it scrolls to the right and updates with your plurks and those of connected, fellow “plurkers.” Twitter has “FriendFeed” to manage the tweet thread’s but Plurk has it all in one place as soon as you have the UI up in front of you – very refreshing and extremely enjoyable.
Plurk presents what your fellow plurkers are up to in a very manageable and easily readable way without being clunky or requiring a lot of mouse-messing around. Twitter doesn’t beat that.
While Twitter allows you 140 characters, Plurk provides some qualifiers to allow you to make full use of the rationed characters allowed – on Twitter, I’d tweet, “I love eating hash browns at the American Diner”, but with Plurk, I can use a range of qualifies – Karl loves, hates, shares, wants, wishes…{my plurk message} – this gets around the shortage of characters by using some standardized qualifiers.
Sign up is a breeze – I mean it took me all of 60 seconds to sign up, and most of that time was wasted on the dilemma I faced about disclosing my age! The ability to migrate email and other social media contacts is also extremely straightforward, and my FaceBook and email address books were notified with one click. Privacy settings are also easy to manage. I really liked the ability to regulate privacy settings for different contacts.
In fact, there is nothing clunky about Plurk – the developers have really gotten their act together on this site.
So where did the name “Plurk” come from?
Plurk may sound like a made-up name that evolved from some stoned developer’s bong-time, but the humor behind the name tells a rather different story. Plurk actually stands for something, unlike most other Web 2.0 sites, and here are the components:
Plurk can be an acronym – People, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma (perhaps there was some bong-time involved after all).
On the other hand, Plurk can be a combination of People and Lurk, for all the cyber-stalkers out there, but I prefer the corruption of Play & Work. Plurk is certainly going to spin-off a whole new range of words for the modern lexicon, and all of them are going to sound like they should mean something naughty – I plurk, you plurked, “Who’s plurking over there?” and of course “What a plurker!”
Frankly, Plurk wins out on Twitter not for the UI but because it has one essential ingre
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