Confessions of a Six Figure Professional Blogger

Why Plurk Is Unexciting And Boring

June 7, 2008 | Social Media

This last week, we saw Plurk enter into our mindset. I first found out about it on FriendFeed and, of course, all the tech bloggers and early adopters on that site went and signed up for Plurk immediately. As did I.

Now, Plurk is basically a Twitter wannabe. The concept is the same, but they use a very different interface. In fact, Plurk isn’t really a microblog because all your “plurks” are organized into conversations and placed onto a horizontal time line. I guess I can see some usefulness to that layout, but at the same time I find it overly limiting.

When all is said and done, though, Plurk is thoroughly unexciting and boring. As much as Twitter goes down and is frustrating everybody these days, the structure of Twitter makes OH so much more sense than Plurk. One BIG thing that I cannot find on Plurk is a simple way to search for Plurk users. The only options I have is to tap into my email accounts or IM accounts and use my existing contact lists to see who is on Plurk. That sucks because now you cannot easily use Plurk to form NEW relationships. I have looked for this search and I cannot find it. It seems like such an obvious thing that I almost feel as if I’m just being completely and utterly blind not to see it. Of course, you can manually view and add people’s profiles. But, you cannot find them unless you have them on your email or IM contact list.

The other reason Plurk is boring is this: how many of these social networks do we need?

Basically, we see the same cliques of people follow each other from site to site, network to network. And, due to the HUGE limitations of Plurk, people are (most ironically) left to OTHER networks like Twitter and FriendFeed to promote themselves or find their friends!

Plurk is not exciting. Its just another website trying to capitalize on the social web. It is way too limiting to be much fun. It is yet another website I would have to monitor separately to talk to the same people I can already chat with on FriendFeed or Twitter. So, why bother? Twitter, despite the server issues, makes it much easier to find people of interest. It is easier to keep track of.

The only reason Plurk is getting the attention it is is because of Twitter downtime. Otherwise, the cool factor of Plurk will be over as fast as it began.

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  • David, I'm sorry that you're so lacking in imagination that you can't see the potential. Perhaps if you came back and engaged in the right conversations, you'd change your opinion. The fact is, there are now at least 2 API's being worked on. Why not give Plurk a chance and wait to see what kind of 3rd-party apps materialize?
  • There are lot of better sites out there! The colors are pretty and the karma thing is just okay. Im over plurk. Sad to even think I was on plurk.
  • I never signed up for the silliness and have no plans at this time to do so. I don't like the interface but I can see how it would be cool to the MySpace crowd.
  • Glad to see this post. I haven't used plurk and can't say whether it is boring or not - I did manage to register but every time I've tried to use it it has been down. People seem to be running to it from twitter because of all the problems with twitter lately but I have yet to see stability from plurk. Occasionally, I feel like perhaps I am missing something by not using plurk because it is being discussed so much - ironically enough, on twitter - but I like twitter. I like it a lot and don't want to leave it. I think if we stick with it it will get past these growing pains. Ebay used to be down all the time when it first got popular and so did a lot of other sites. Or maybe our attention spans have all become so short that we must constantly run to the newest and shiniest.

    Anyway, thanks for this. I've seen so many posts bashing on twitter that it was refreshing to read that someone else wants to stick with and likes it even though there are so many problems with it right now.
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