With all the recent outages and downtime over at Twitter (no doubt stirred up because of my recent article on How to Use Twitter for Business), many people have been checking out Plurk, a similar but different approach with the same 140 character limit.
There are some interesting twists with the Plurk approach. There’s an interactive timeline that shows threads and makes it easier to follow a conversation. There’s karma points for signing up people. You can create "cliques" to better organize friends. It doesn’t experience any downtime (so far.)
Is this a business tool? Who the hell knows. Is it fun to use? Definitely. Plus, there are game like features to it that make you want to invite more friends, post/plurk more often and get more involved. I’m not giving up my twitter account, and I’m surely not giving up my blog for plurk, but like an 80′s arcade video game, I’m sure it’s going to get a few more of my quarters.
If you’d like an intelligent, detailed explanation of everything Plurk check out Frank Martin’s post on The Question of Plurk.
And, if you’d like to play around in Plurk, click on this invite or come visit my page(?) on Plurk.
Rich Brooks
I Really Don’t Have Time for This
