Today I went back to visit Plurk and updated it since I last left it in favour of Twitter back in June. While I was trying to re-familiarise myself with Plurk, I had a sneaking suspicion that there were many like me who tried it when it first came out but now exist with 0.0 karma and have not been back since.
After a bit of poking around, I found that friends like Kevin and Adrianna were karma-less like me. I guess it was comforting to know that I wasn’t the only one who can’t manage two microblogging platforms.
But then in an attempt to restore my Plurk reputation and give this platform another chance, I stumbled upon the very helpful “Find Your Twitter Friends” button. I clicked it, put in my username and got a bigger surprise! All the top social media and Web 2.0 experts I follow on Twitter including Steve Rubel, Jeremiah Owyang, Mitch Joel, and Nat Torkington have picked abandonment in favour of Twitter.
I don’t think Plurk is a bad service at all, but I think it’ll take quite a bit of effort to do a Facebook on me (I’ve officially abondoned Friendster in favour of a Facebook which came much later).
Maybe I’ll visit Plurk again in another four months to see if it has evolved into a game changer. But for now, there’s just too much going for me on Twitter’s shores to migrate.
Filed under: Social Media
Agree here. While the ‘friendfeed’ feature is great for discussions.
For me I still prefer a single-threaded simple conversation like Twitter.
Another reason why I don’t really like to visit Plurk is that it’s being overly heavy (load-wise) for a simple short-messaging microblogging site due to its implementation of the timeline feature. Pretty unnecessary IMO.
what i do is, i use ping.fm services ( http://ping.fm ) to transport status updates as i go through my life.
i consider twitter/plurk/facebook/friendster as a tool. which means, when the needs are not required, dropping will not cause much heartpain (from the effort of building the update efforts).
from a single point at ping.fm i update constantly. i use firefox so i use twitterfox to keep up with those on twitter. I log in to plurk once in awhile to see the threads that people discuss in.
my email will send me notices if anyone responded to any status updates sent to facebook & friendster.
so, what im saying is, you really need not visit plurk all that often. just Ping out your messages. your plurk friends will not be none the wiser, unless you included links!
just a thought
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The problem with Plurk and other latecomers to the microblogging game is that Twitter still has the one significant advantage over the rest – the sheer number of users, which I dare say is likely a magnitude more than it’s closest competitor.
Unless there are significant push factors (like Friendster’s performance problems in its early days), most folks won’t abandon Twitter outright for another microblogging platform. Like you implied – it’s tough managing multiple microblogging presences.
Plurk just doesn’t offer enough of a compelling reason to switch, weird mascots non-withstanding.
Now that Twitter’s usability and stability is under control, there is very little compelling reason for folks to go to other microblogging platforms. Like you said, it’s a
Plurk has great features but it proves again how much value is in the community itself and how sticky that it. In spite of all its problems, Twitter still reigns as the most popular micro-blogging community.