Well, if you’ve visited my website in the last day, you’ll see I’ve added my plurk widget to the sidebar. I’m finding plurk altogether more motivational than twitter. A recent comparison of the two services I think was unfair to plurk, mostly due to overhyped twitter features that aren’t even working correctly half the time.
Even if Twitter solves their reliability concerns, plurk just feels more alive. It’s not a single thread with everyone’s crap mixed in (and hacks like #hashtags). It’s a threaded timeline: part web forum, part IM, and part IRC. And yes, a bit twitter, too. I like the fact that it’s Web 2.0 enough for my friends who won’t get on IRC (still my #1 place for synchronous) and that the web layout is attractive. The “get more points to get more features” thing is a pain, but I’d rather have that than some sort of “pay us $$ to get more features,” I think.
I moved over to plurk when some of my friends followed Leo Laporte over. I’m not a personality cult-er, but I do like keeping tabs on my friends. And I’m finding that plurk’s interface encourages more synchronous collaboration (read: chatting) than twitter ever did. In about 48h on the service I’ve managed 15 “plurks” (microblog entries) and 38 responses; I never hit that level of engagement with twitter.
Once they add some sort of SMS interface (I can’t get their IM interface to work…) it’ll be a sure fire hit, I think.
So you twitter types out there: would you miss me from twitter if i semi-abandoned it?
plurk’s lack of SMS is a dealbreaker for me. “Oh, we have a mobile version” – yeah great when I am getting charged up the arse for data and not about to get an unlimited plan. The ease of SMS updating from twitter is very cool, and makes it good for stuff like commenting on a concert during it. Doing that from a mobile page? feh.
Stay on twitter for now! At least until plurk gets SMS compliant, or I get an iphone :p
My big problem is that twitter SMS isn’t working for me – even though I subscribed and it did SMS me a confirmation message. I don’t understand why it won’t work. So I gave up on it existing at all…
I find Plurk fun, when I have time to mess around and have fun. I don’t find it motivational though. I don’t find it helps me with my daily workload at all; in fact it distracts from it way too much. It’s like a graphical IRC. I turn IRC off when I’m working, and I do the same with Plurk.
Now I’m not putting Plurk down, but I do actually use Twitter to keep in touch with some colleagues during the working day, and I can do that while I work, quite successfully. Plurk is too consuming, and takes up a whole screen as well.