Funny how microblogs seem to sprout like mushrooms lately — Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter, Tumblr… Well this one went under my radar about a month ago, and I got hooked!
Getting addicted to Plurk was a result of several things. As you may know, I spend my life on Twitter for some time already. It turns out that Twitter wasn’t designed the way it should be, thus when the number of total users swelled to a large size, bugs appeared in the form of Tweets not loading, delayed entries, etc. I am using Twitterrific, a standalone client, to update my Tweets — this one isn’t working properly as well. Given the impression that the Twitter developers aren’t really that concerned about a glaring problem in the design of the database, I have decided to jump ship when I read some of the Twitter friends posted about it.
As it turned out, a lot of Twitter friends are on Plurk as well! Given the timeline approach to different posts and a threaded view for all replies, you see everything organized in a manner similar to a ticker tape of threaded messages.
One feature that causes quite a stir among the users is the Karma system. Depending on your activity, Karma plus points are given to you, depending on your activity over a period of time. Some despise this, yet some actually liked it. Enough Karma points would unlock several items on the profile editing page.
So what are you waiting for? Join me at Plurk!