Recently there has been lot of whispering on my Twitter friend’s timeline as to who’s on, or will be joining Plurk. I took a quick look at it and my initial impressions were underwhelming, but I decided to make an account anyways.
The first thing in any new social network would be to find friends from other social networks.
I used the find friends from Twitter feature, and it gave me a list of Plurk users to add, which was great – until I realized it doesn’t send them a friend request. Now I was stuck as a fan of my Twitter friends, and to add them as friends on Plurk, I had to manually go to each person’s page and click the “Add as friend” button. Not exactly what I had in mind when I initiated the import functionality.
As a developer, I’m always looking to see if something has an API. Plurk doesn’t have one yet, but that doesn’t stop others from making their own versions. I particularly like this one from YungSang. Mashables say that an official API is coming. I’ll be looking at that as soon as it comes!
What Plurk does offer in comparison to Twitter is a more social experience. The whole Karma system and the numerous rewards found throughout the system work great to attract users and build adoption. However, it feels a bit gimicky to encourage usage with rewards. Time will tell if this is a good idea, when the novelty of the Karma rewards system runs out.
Plurk looks great, but it’s not enough to attract me to use it over Twitter. Other Twitter folk express similar first impressions. Lets see if my mind changes in the future.
Yeah, on one hand, Plurk increased my traffic by a little, but on the other hand, not good
I don’t think I’m going to Plurk 
Comment by Raul — June 13, 2008 @ 8:27 am
I’m a big fan of social networking! I really like the way sites like Facebook have evolved over the years and the great new features that are in the works to make other sites work well toegether.
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