Plurk is a micro-blogging lifestreaming service that presents your activity and what your friends are doing in a graphic timeline. Think Twitter plus a visual stream of people’s messages. Plurk has been increasing in popularity and is deeply populated, as a percentage of users, with international members. Check out this list of the most influential Plurkers and the nations they come from to get a sense of how global micro-blogging has become.

The timeline provides an interesting additional dimension of information, representing how much activity is going on simultaneously, but it isn’t clear this is going to change the way people lifestream. The reason is that the timeline is available only on the Plurk site. Any desktop tools, and there are a number of them (see below) for posting to Plurk will present messages in a list instead of a timeline. Plurk loses something in translation to the desktop (see the screenshot of the Plurk sidebar for Firefox to the left).

That said, Plurk’s emphasis on a list of verbs to identify different kinds of postings, such as Mitch “asks” or Jill “responds,” adds useful context for following along with the conversation. It works better in the visual timeline, since you can relate two postings at a glance, yet it is also useful in desktop tools. A “clique” feature, which lets you create closed groups that can share messsages within Plurk is really convenient for keeping in touch with friends or about a particular topic. For instance, one could create a clique of friends who are planning a party for a friend and keep that communication separate from their public Plurks.

The service integrates with some of the other tools you may be using to keep in touch with friends, such as instant messaging through Google Chat, which is integrated into GMail, and Jabber-based messaging systems. Plurk also supports animated graphics in messages, which can be fun or extremely annoying, depending on your perspective.

The service can be embedded into a blog page and sharing your Plurks on social networks is made relatively easy with widgets. You’ll need to understand how to paste widget code into your blog or MySpace page to make this work (we’ll have a how-to link for this soon).

What is surprisingly lacking is an RSS feed of plurks that can be shared through an RSS feed. With the extra information about the microblog postings Plurk collects, it would be really useful to have RSS feeds. I know the company wants members to hang out on its site, but without more desktop apps to choose from, RSS subscriptions would help members get the word out about Plurk.

As mentioned, many lifestreaming applications become really useful when they can be added to your desktop to provide quick access for posting. There aren’t many of these applications for Plurk, yet. I believe the reason is that, without the visual timeline, Plurk doesn’t stand apart from Twitter enough. Plurk desktop apps currently include:

Plurk Firefox Sidebar (Mozilla Firefox browser required)
PlurkIt (requires Adobe AIR) 

Note: Plurk displays a “Find your Twitter friends” badge that has not worked when I’ve tried it in several different browsers. The company should take this down until the friend import function is reliable.

Home Page: Plurk.com
A micro-blogging site that puts lifestreams into a visual perspective.

Free.

Tags: activity tracking, conversation, friend lists, micro-blogging, mobile

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Social Site Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.