Plurk, twitter for teens?
Just heard of this new service called Plurk which is a similar “microblogging” service rather like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc. According to Venture Beat it launched in January this year and seems to be targeting a more teenage demographic.
bub.blicio.us asks the question “is Plurk another Twitter?” and in many ways it is, it’s a lifestreaming/microblogging platform with friends and fans etc. The one major difference that I see in Plurk is it’s “Karma” measure, and that is one of the only reasons why I think it will be interesting to watch what happens. Karma is essentially a measure of your level of participation in the Plurk system, and it’s the kind of explicit feedback that I think can fuel the growth of social systems. One of the reasons that Yelp is so successful is it has multiple feedback mechanisms that reward and recognize the right activity in the social network, and therefore encourages more of that activity. If you reward the right “value creating” activities on your social network you set up very powerful virtuous cycles.
Mind you, as bub.blicio.us also pointed out there is no apparent business model or revenue model, agreed, but what else is new.
Oh, you can find me on Plurk here
UPDATE: Looks like Plurk is the new twitter… it’s down 
10 Comments, Comment or Ping
Gavin Heaton
Hey Karl … if you get the site down message, you can often just switch over to the mobile version which appears to be more robust (and strangely enough, much like the twitter web interface) — http://www.plurk.com/m
Jun 2nd, 2008
Marcus Nelson
It’s a nice looking service and does have some intriguing features, but I’m having a heck of a time importing contacts from Yahoo or Gmail. That’s a bit frustrating for a new user.
Jun 2nd, 2008
Karl
Agreed on the contact importing and new user experience, it was not smart enough to figure out who was already using plurk and just wanted me to spam my 2000+ gmail contacts, uh, no!
And yes on the design, really good looking
Jun 2nd, 2008
Early adopter
Been on plurk for a couple months now and I definitely see this as a twitter for teens / non-geeks. The UI is just so much more engaging. I bet the contact importing will be one of those features that is constantly evolving/improving as the site matures.
Jun 2nd, 2008
Mark Evans
Plurk strikes me as Twitter with some fun elements such as emoticons and the ability to use a variety of pre-determined verbs. As a Twitter user, I’ve found Plurk to be interesting but not compelling enough to change. And unlike Pownce - the logical alternative to Twitter - there aren’t enough useful features such as file-sharing - that would make people think twice about using Plurk on a regular basis.
Jun 2nd, 2008
freerangemom
Think you pegged the target market. Want more proof? Look at “punky” and her friends on plurk. Their conversations are a series of emoticons, and who can get the dancing banana!
Jun 3rd, 2008
Alex Funk
Amazing how much growth there has been in the microblogging arena! Whereas there are only a few main players for good blogging applications the microblogging world has been flooded with by some accounts one hundred or more twitter clones. Plurk has done something interesting here and visually perhaps made it more fun than Twitter or Pownce but does it have a competitive advantage?
Jun 10th, 2008
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