Plurk: Looking In All The Wrong Places

Stan Schoeder summarizes the quirky appeal of cute-as-a-button Plurk, a newly announced social presence tool (a la Twitter):

[from I Like Plurk Better Than Twitter, But Should I Even Bother?]

The service has an odd, quirky feel to it; it’s much more visual than Twitter, and it’s a real fun to use. It uses colors to emphasize your ‘moods’, and it introduces the concept of karma, which should be familiar to Reddit users; the more you use the service, the more karma you get. In this case, karma even lets you unlock certain features, which almost feels like a mini game (if you like very boring mini games). Finally, just like Pownce, Plurk lets you divide your friends into “cliques”, which is just a fancy word for groups.

The question is: are these features the ones that meet the unmet needs of some community of users out there? I bet not.

1. Timeline -- Unworkable as soon as you have more than a handful of friends, I bet.
2. Karma -- Karma (or whuffie or swarmth) is a measure of reputation, but it's only meaningful if you can use it in some way, not just as some sort of game where people try to get high scores. How do you apply karma in Plurk?
3. Emotions -- Aggregating based on the emotional tone of verbs that can replace 'is' is cute but lame, in the long run. How quickly did you start to hate the 'is' in Facebook's presence? This is likely a nod to Jonathan Harris' wefeelfine.org, but that is more art than tool.
4. Cliques -- I am not a fan of any sort of ordering of friends that requires work or exclusion, like the conventional notion of groups, or here, cliques. Aggregation into 'groupings' would be interesting, but groupings are based on attributes, like tags or lexical analysis. For example, filtering to just the folks currently in SF, or those who have used the word 'n82' in a post, or people tagged 'reboot08'. Groupings are cool because the aggregation becomes another shared element of the service, not a filing system that each user can obsess over privately. (Would be nice to explore how it could be integrated into Twitter, by the way.)

I am going to take a pass on Plurk, based on this scattershot analysis. Unlike Stan, who wonders if he should even bother although he likes Plurk better than Twitter, I think Plurk is superficially interesting but is unlikely to plow any new fields.

Put another way, a more stable and mature Twitter could provide users a Plurkish UI -- either as a Twitter provided alternative or from an outsider infatuated with wefeelfine.org -- but I wonder if these features are really that interesting to folks? I would rather see on-the-fly groupings of my contacts based on geolocation, for example.

[Update: Duncan Riley makes some points I buy:

The one definite thing I can say about the service is that visually it’s different, and that can be read in both a positive and negative way. The layout shakes up the staid microblogging format Twitter popularized, and yet it may take some getting use to as I’m not a huge fan so far. The service is already experiencing serious growth pains with features being disabled, including custom avatars and importing friends (least the gmail import didn’t work for me). Still, early days and people who are willing to explore new ideas are always worthy of at least some support.

]

Comments

[Andy Piper]

It's yet another mildly-interesting microblogging site which mimics Twitter, and has features of Pownce (link/image sharing) and Rememble (timeline). Without an API, and with little community, I find it hard to see how it will be successful. Right now though, it's an amusement rather than something I find particularly useful. I do like the groups / cliques thing, and I think that Plurk have probably implemented this in a smoother way than Pownce. The UI is a bit overwhelming though, and with no multichannel support / API I can't see where it might go... mind you that same criticism applies to BrightKite.

[Stephanie Booth]

I think having to choose a verb and a mood each time you send a message multiplies by 3 the work one has to do. Defeats the purpose IMHO.

[Stowe Boyd]

Andy - I haven't seen Rememble, but I will look now. I agree that it's unlikely to be viable. Why do you like the cliques thing?

[Andy Piper]

I find grouping useful in general - for instance, if I want to send a private message to a group of people. Useful in the context of companies, projects, activities etc.

[Tom Armitage]

I at least like the idea of a service like this that understands that groups aren't mutually exclusive.

However, over a conversation at lunch, one idea emerged: surely by calling cliques that, you load the functionality - and the usage of it - with a sizable number of negative connotations. I've never experienced a positive usage of that term. But why would you design functionality that you didn't want people to use?