Twitter this evening is rife with talk about Plurk, a new micro-blogging service that brings a whole new meaning to the term feature-creep. I’m here.
I mean, the joy of Twitter, and I suspect the reason why we all stick with it despite the appallingly flakey service we receive, is its simplicity. It let you post short messages on the web, and that’s pretty much it. You can do more than that, but that is usually by using a third party service through the APIs.
Plurk adds stuff like groups, called – deliberately provocatively, surely – ‘cliques’, so you can send messages to just a select group of folk, points for regular posting (like that won’t encourage pointless noise…) and the ability to have what look like threaded replies under posts.
I just don’t need this stuff, frankly. The best thing that comes from Twitter is contained within the 140 characters of the posts people make. It’s about the content, not the bells and whistles.
But the most fundamentally annoying thing I found with Plurk during my brief play this evening is the way the whole thing is presented – on a horizontal rather than vertical timeline, which run from right to left. This means that the most recent stuff is the first thing you see, which is good, but once you start scrolling it soon gets really confusing. Well, it does for me.
Lots of people are signing up and giving it a go. But I can’t see anyone sticking with this in the long term. Unless they’re mental.
This was my first impression too: quite useless – especially because they’re is no easy way to find other people’s Plurk.
Now, a day later, I’ve decided to still give it a chance. Some people really love the place, because it’s easier to find back a plurk than it is to find back a tweet…
I have to agree on this fact.
Only today I have found out about the labelling verb effect, it wasn’t directly clear to me that “is” was changeable into “wants, will, etc.”.
It’s a different concept, but this doesn’t mean it’s useless after all.
If it’s likeable to some, it will have its users and its fans…
Twitter also started as an highly criticized “useless” service in the eyes of many blog commentators of the first hour.
Twitter is still disparaged by many as being a time waste, but that’s by the by. When it came out, it was something new. Plurk is nothing new, just an existing ideas with bells and whistles on it.
Anyway, to be fair to me – which I like to be – I didn’t say Plurk was useless. Just that you would have to be mental to use it. I think there is a difference there, somewhere.