Moonlit Jazz

Kiari = me

So, the last week of May or so (but before June), I joined a little thing called Plurk.  I had no idea what it was all about and just kinda hung out a little wondering why I was there.  On June 1st, Leo Laporte mentioned it and suddenly a whole flock of folks started showing up!  At the same time, Twitter was suffering from intermittent uptime at best and many Twitterers found themselves at this new adventure called Plurk.

Plurk is fun and weird and just a bit frantic.  If you friend a lot of people and they friend you back, you can follow their timelines.  And it gets messy.  Even if you’re not part of the conversation, you get updates everytime someone posts.

Early on, IM worked but has now been taken offline.  A bit of a shame, as it was the easiest way to keep track mobile-wise.  Although the mobile site is decent enough, if you have too many friends, it’s not hard to get lost.  SMS is also a feature missing from Plurk.

Karma is one of the interesting features.  It’s based on your plurk activity, your friends’ plurks, invited friends, etc.  I admit, I was a little too intrigued by karma and tried to up my karma by posting a lot and replying to other plurks and adding folks willy nilly.  But now (as my karma has started to go down), I’m not too interested.

To cut down on the “noise,” you can choose which plurk buddies you want showing on your timeline.  But this begs the question of why even having them as your buddies.  You can also create cliques, which is a nice way to post to a select few, but there’s no way at the moment to just read plurks from your different cliques.

Some folks seem intent on comparing Plurk to Twitter.  I am not one of those people.  Besides the fact that you can only tweet or plurk short messages, the two are different.  Until Plurk adds SMS and IM, it really doesn’t compare to Twitter.

I like Plurk, but it’s better served for those times when you’ve got nothing else to do but sit in front of your computer, following different conversations on different topics.  That said, Plurk away!  🙂