Plurk: It’s Like Twitter, But Sideways!
03.07.08Filed Under: Uncategorized
Plurk is like Twitter. The difference is that Twitter is organized vertically, and Plurk is sideways, on a timeline. That’s pretty much it. Plurk is also a place to put thoughts that are too trivial or mundane to go on Twitter (really). That part is sad, cause it means that 140-character “Tweets” are how people express their deep thoughts. It’s also ridiculous, because most “Tweets” are already painfully trivial.
Another aspect of Plurk is its karma system. Yep, as you use the system and amass friends, your karma score goes up. Your karma score goes down, however, as people un-follow your and reject your friend requests. The basic idea is to keep it a non-commercial, with a paucity of spamming. Fine. But what do you get for your higher karma? Can you redeem your score for anything of value? Nope. It gets you access to — wait for it — advanced smileys. Take a breath. Elite users get to use smileys that the rest of the plebes don’t have access to. That’s it.
Finally, a brief statement on Plurk’s design. Imagine ordering a meal from a restaurant, but before they served it to you, they fed it to a pig that chewed it up, and then regurgitated it on your plate. It would bring a new definition to “a pig’s lunch”. That’s Plurk for ya. There’s the aforementioned smileys. That’s one problem. Then there’s the fact that when you mouse over certain posts, the box expands for no apparent reason. It’s just all blinky and shit. Also, a few times when we clicked on someone’s profile, it went through some cockamamie URL redirect. Why? No clue. For understandable reasons, folks are hungry for a Twitter alternative that doesn’t crash. But sorry… Plurk definitely ain’t it.
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