In the on-going quest to meet a need that's probably already been fulfilled, this past week I was introduced to a new Twitter-esque service called 'Plurk!,' which, surprisingly enough, actually brings something new to the game.  We're all familiar with the standard micro-blogging client whether through Twitter, Pownce, or Jaiku but Plurk takes a different approach.  It kind of reminds me of mad-libs (remember those?) where, instead of filling in the verb or noun, you fill in everything else around the verb.  So for instance, a minute ago I plurked that I was writing a blog post.  The interface is as follows:  (username) [list of verbs] textbox.  My username is dmkemick, I chose [is] from the list of verbs, and filled in 'writing a blog post' for the rest of the message.  That's right, "dmkemick is writing a blog post."  Now that I explain it, it kind of sounds needlessly complicated.

plurk

One thing Plurk has going for it is that it has a pretty cool interface.  Instead of your standard list of messages from you and your friends, everything is displayed as a timeline so you can see the times of all of the messages that are put up, and compare them relatively easily.  You can also scroll through the timeline by clicking and dragging your cursor which is cool.  Basically, everything shines with a fresh coat of AJAX so you shouldn't have much trouble getting around the site.  Much like the other clients you can customize the way your page looks, giving yourself a custom theme, custom avatar, and even a custom logo in the top right.  This is where Plurk really brings the new hotness.

Plurk almost makes a game out of microblogging.  For putting up messages you get points throughout the day, and at the end of the day these points are rolled up to give you a karma rating.  Based on this rating you get some further customization options.  So, for instance, if your karma gets above 25 points you unlock a new group of icons to display on your page.  They've broken the karma levels up into three different tiers: karma above 0 gives you the standard icon set, karma above 25 unlocks 4 new icons, and karma above 50 unlocks the last set.  This kind of reminds me of an MMORPG for microblogging, and because I'm a gamer that sort of thing is right up my alley.  You can also get special indicators beside your avatar for inviting new people which is kind of cool.

The real question, as with all of these services is "Will It Scale?!"  Remember those "Will It Blend" videos?  It's kind of like that except where as with Will It Blend the answer is almost always yes, with Will It Scale the answer is almost always no.  Twitter is the biggest culprit in this avenue.  It seems like everyday I'm hearing about how Twitter has gone down again, or you can't reply to messages, or inviting friends is broken.  These services were usually rushed to success, and so the transition from staging to production and then sustainable production has been, for the most part, a rough one.  Of course contests in which tech luminaries are encouraged to get as many followers as possible probably don't help matters much (and they wonder why the service goes down?).

plurk_user_explosion Anyways, I received my invite to Plurk from Leo Laporte, who basically spammed everyone with his Plurk invites with the hope of testing its scalability.  At the time when this was going on (last weekend) Plurk was really new to the game, and was still running off of staging servers.  After Leo launched his assault the service went from a hundred testers to over 2000 users in a few hours.  Compared to the amount of users twittering all day that number is pretty paltry, but for a brand new service such a surge could be crippling.  Still, despite being out-numbered and ill-prepared Plurk kept plucking along.  That's not to say that it will continue to scale if they ever reach Twitter status, but at least you would assume that Leo's experiment would have taught them the importance of consistency.

Will I stick with Plurk?  Who knows.  I like the concepts but right now the community is still pretty small and I'm enjoying Pownce more than any of the alternatives.  If you came to this blog from Twitter you know that I use my Twitter account almost exclusively to pimp new blog posts.  I'd like to say the same won't happen with Plurk but at the very least it can be used to reach a few more readers.

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