Daily Tech Bits

Plurksourcing: Cool Plurk Features

It’s been about a month since I reviewed Plurk, and in that time I’ve been getting more and more involved in the site. So I decided to try my hand at a bit of Plurksourcing (like crowdsourcing, but on Plurk). I asked other users what they thought were the coolest features. Here’s what they said (multiple responses from the same plurker have been aggregated:

• Konstantino: I’d say replying to conversations properly. Best feature for me.
• Becca L-Smith:  Develop friendships and hold interesting and diverse conversations (plus several really cool emoticons). collecting karma is pretty cool too. It’s fun to unlock new emoticons and features. I just wish there were more goodies at other levels.
• paulthe: i would agree, the file and photosharing is good, but it is the conversational aspect of Plurk that keeps me coming back. plus dancing bananas (also popular with bloingo and talespinner)
• miketempleton I love the threaded conversations for asking questions. It’s very easy to go back through and digest.
• CindyThomas: I just love the layout and ease of use. The timeline, the ease of responding… it’s very user friendly. It’s so easy!
• otherdeb: For me, it’s the developing friendships with other writers and knitters. Also, it’s a great place to share my blog posts. It’s also a great place to get some mentoring, and have some “how-to” type questions answered.
• dazcox:The fact that you can have a plurk page like this (writer’s note: all these responses were listed on a single page with my question at the top) is what makes plurk useful. the fellowship of Plurkers and community anti-spam is good too.
• Sociologist: This is certainly the coolest thing I’ve seen done on plurk. A single question/answer response kinda thingy
• JimBob51 : following threads like having mini-blogs
• jimhutchinson : being able to keep the comments list open and watch it grow in real time as plurks are added.
• HopeWilbanks: I like the timeline and the fact that you can ask questions and your answers are all threaded together with the question. It’s difficult to keep up with answers in Twitter if they aren’t DM’d or @ to you.

Thanks for joining in, everyone. If Plurk is new to you, check out my Plurk page and sign up.

Weekend Reads 13 June 2008

It’s almost the weekend, so I thought I’d share some of the interesting posts I’ve read this week. The first is a post from a Guardian UK blog on the Future of Journalism. It looks at how microblogging can be used in this way. Once again, the question of citizen journalism is under discussion, with Twitter as the main means of ‘demystifying journalism’. I don’t know that I agree with the article, but it raised some interesting points.

It occurred to me that Twitter is often included in discussion about the changing news process, and there have been many discussions online about how to use Twitter as a reporting tool. But while Twitter has huge potential for publishers, it is, at its core, a communication tool. It’s like round looking at a phone, trying to plan some editorial that uses the phone - when actually the thing to do is just to use it to talk to people.

Next up is Darren Rowse’s analysis of the differences between Plurk and Twitter. It’s all about how conversations happen, and he illustrates with some screenshots of responses to the same question on both services.

The other thing that I like about Plurk is that conversations are contained and don’t get as mixed up as they do on Twitter.

I have to agree that following conversations is easier on Plurk.

Finally, as the browser wars hot up again, Lifehacker has done a speed test comparing the latest release candidates for Firefox and Opera with Safari and IE7. IE7 takes no prizes, but the other browsers each win in one category. Happy reading.

Playing With Plurk

Anyone who knows me knows that I love to try out new things, so when I heard about Plurk, I couldn’t resist signing up to see what it was like. Many people suggest that it’s a Twitter clone, and it’s true that there are some similarities, like the 140 character limit for sending status updates. You can follow and be followed (having friends or fans in Plurk). But for me, that’s where the similarities end.

Plurk’s interface is very different. It’s a scrolling timeline moving from right to left, which seemed counter intuitive at first. However, it means that the latest content is always on the left where you read first. You can see all the updates you choose to follow (you can befriend people without getting their updates) in the top window. The bottom window shows your friends and fans and your karma (which is points you get from participating in the site.)

What I like about Plurk is that you can use lots of different verbs to describe your updates (thinks, feels, and so on) as well as a blank one so you can roll your own. You could end up talking about yourself in the third person, or you could behave Twitter style and just say what you want to say anyway. You can also set up an extended profile, MySpace style, but I haven’t done that yet.

A great feature is the ability to reply to a Plurk and see the responses in a drop down window, making it much easier to follow conversations than Twitter. The interface is definitely an improvement, but there’s one thing that’s lacking.

Goodness knows that the search features in Twitter aren’t anything to get excited about, but it’s virtually impossible to find your friends from other services in Plurk. You can add people from email accounts and IM but what I wanted to do was import my Twitter friends. No can do. Instead, I’ve been playing a hunt and click game to get a grand total of nine friends so far.

Plurk also makes it easy for you to group friends into cliques, though I haven’t tried this feature yet. Will I stick with it? I have no idea. I’ve got a lot of good friends on Twitter and unless they all move to Plurk it will probably remain secondary for me. That said, I think Twitter could learn a lot from Plurk, and it’s one to watch.

Here’s my Plurk profile if you want to add me.

Plurk Or Twitter?

Everybody’s talking about Plurk and wondering whether this is the Twitter killer.

Who knows? With Twitter more down than up recently, and having to resort to Tumblr to keep users updated on statuses, perhaps it’s time for a new service to take the throne. One thing that Plurk offers that Twitter doesn’t have is the ability to group your friends - something that would certainly make Twitter more useful.

Don’t think that Twitter will give up easily, though. Although everyone’s talking about Plurk, there are still a lot of things that Twitter has got right, like allowing multiple ways of sending status updates.