Plurk v Twitter: A First Look

There’s a new kid on the micro-blogging block and that’s Plurk. As a fairly long-time Twitter fan I was intrigued to see so much commotion about it going on in the Twittersphere so I had to check it out for myself.

A Brief Video Tour of Plurk

I put together a short video showing how Plurk and Twitter compare and in the video I also mention a tool called FeedTweeter that allows you to take your Plurks and automatically Tweet them so if you want to test out Plurk while you continue to use Twitter this is a way to do that without too much extra effort.

Click here to watch the Plurk v Twitter video at YouTube

Plurk’s Unique Features

Plurk has hit the market in a fully-featured way. It has quite a sexy ajax interface and comes with some significant features that make it stand out from the crowd.

Horizontal Timeline

Perhaps the most apparent feature is the way in which the plurks are displayed. Around half of the screen real-estate is occupied by a horizontal timeline and all the plurks are plotted on that timeline. This allows you to see exactly when each plurk was made and scrolling through them is very simple. There are a number of advantages and disadvantages of this timeline depending on your point of view.

With Twitter, it’s easy to ‘lose’ older tweets so if you follow a lot of people or the people you follow are quite active, older ones will soon scroll off the main display. With Plurk it’s so easy to just scroll through that you won’t lose anything if you don’t want to. However, I don’t know how well this interface would scale if you followed a lot of people. At least that might put off the spammers that go around following thousands of profiles just to get follow-backs!

The other disadvantage of the timeline for me at least, is that I have to be at the Plurk website to see it. As you’ll see in the video, my choice of Twitter interface is a Firefox plugin that shows the tweets in a little popup in the status bar. As new tweets come in they float up in the notification area so I always know what’s going on without me having to actually visit the Twitter site. However, I think this problem will be resolved with a Plurk API which I’ll discuss in a moment.

Easy to Follow Discussions

Twitter works by allowing you to send a simple update out to all of your followers. It’s beautifully simple. However it does not foster conversations very easily because the mechanism to converse with other users is limited to a simple reply which is not attached to a particular message.

Plurk however, tracks each plurk and its responses individually and makes it much easier to respond to other people’s plurks. This makes it far more conversational than Twitter which can be somewhat one-way. I think this is possibly the most important feature to allow Plurk to rise above Twitter. However, those conversations can be quite clunky to follow so it will be interesting to see how the interface holds up once an API is released.

Organising Friends Into Cliques

As I explain in my Twitter Guide, it’s important to figure out how you intend to use your account. If you are using it primarily to market some online web presence then you might want to keep the personal updates to a minimum. This is a problem with many social media profiles. However Plurk has a very simple solution to this problem by allowing you to organise your friends into cliques. So I could have one for my personal friends and another for people in the Internet Marketing world. Twitter desperately needs this functionality.

Karma Rating

Plurk has a concept of a karma rating which is just a scale between 0 and 100 to represent how active its users are. At the moment the only significance that I can see of this rating is that being one of the users with the highest karma will put you on the list of top users which might help you get more followers! Other than that, we’ll have to see.

Easily Embed Images & Video

Twitter allows you to embed a url into your Tweet. Plurk takes this one step further and allows you to directly embed images and videos directly from services such as YouTube and Flickr. This doesn’t just show up as a URL but instead puts a tiny thumbnail inside the plurk and allows the media to be viewed from inside of the interface without having to leave the site. Not an earth-shattering feature, but nice :-)

Plurk Needs An API

API stands for Application Programming Interface and what that means is that right now, Plurk cannot be modified by third parties in any way. An API is needed to allow programmers to create tools and services that integrate with it. One of the strengths of Twitter is that since the release of its API a huge number of tools and web applications have been released which greatly enhance the basic functionality.

However, once Plurk release such an API it will be very interesting to see what the developers can come up with.

Plurk or Twitter - Who Will Win?

Plurk is richer and has more features than Twitter right now but Twitter has a huge following. If I send out a tweet it gets to over 1,200 people, if I send out a plurk it goes to about 12 people! Which am I going to use right now? Yeah, Twitter!

BUT… if you currently use Twitter as a marketing tool like I do then it is in your best interests to keep abreast of the happening of the micro-blogging world in general. Remember that Twitter is just a tool, unless it’s a place where you just hang out with your friends, in which case this post is largely irrelevant! With any new tool, those that get in on the ground floor will have an advantage so if you think that Plurk might have a future then it’s worth signing up now.

Stumble it!