I remember when Plurk first came out.  At first glance its user interface was different but once you got to spending some time on the site, it was pretty cool.  As luck would have it, Plurk also came around when Twitter was having some of its worst downtime in history.  Take that, and some nifty enhanced features (conversations on one page, ability to share images and video, dancing bananas and it seemed as though Plurk really could have taken over the microblogging space.

But it didn’t.

Why? I would offer that Plurk ultimately didn’t listen to its community.  Perhaps the dealbreaker for me and others was the fact about not making karma optional.  The nature of many on the social web is to be competitive, and Plurk gave us a forum for this.  The more active you are, the more karma you received.  However, if there was a period of time that you were inactive (say, you had a holiday, a weekend, religious reasons, etc) you would actually lose karma.  A number of people brought this up, but Plurk stood firm, saying that if you didn’t want to see karma on your profile, you could just hide it out with a different page design.  That’s a band-aid to the problem.

I was thinking about keeping quiet over this situation, that is, until I received an email from Plurk last week talking about the Plurk activity I’ve missed for the week.  After seeing this, I chatted with Teeg, a friend of mine and still staunch supporter of Plurk.  She said that she didn’t get the email! This is a community fail on the part of Plurk to target the Plurkers that are not participating, rather than the ones that are.

So Plurk, I didn’t want to say it, but you’re doing it wrong:

That said, I’m going to try a one post per day (not counting the weekend) pace for a while.  This will allow me to elaborate beyond the sometimes too brief 140 characters, yet get to the point of a daily piece of wisdom.

As I mentioned on the new Collective Thoughts Twitter account: expect more.

With me today is a popular former Digg user, Diggboss. Thanks for joining me, Diggboss. Ok, let’s get right into it:

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. When did you start getting into social media in the first place, and which network did you like the most from the start?

My scripts used Digg APIs. Anyone can use Digg APIs. Digg data is open under Creative Commons.

Absolutely not as I said anyone with a little knowledge of CURL or WGET can make use of the APIs and do what I did.

Digg is not FaceBook, coders please stay away from Digg. Digg does not have open policies and does not support coders. Every script is a BAD script. Digg uses its TOS to its advantage.

Haha, thats an outrageous question, nope, never.

9. So what’s next for Diggboss?

I am sure Digg would restore my account, I don’t have an alternative. I am banned.

I loved Digg and will continue to love it, my love for digg is not conditional.

Everyone thinks their dad is weird. But I, on the other hand, know my dad is totally crazy. He does this thing called “Social Media” or whatever. I can’t even count the times that he’s tried to explain it to me. Don’t get me wrong, I mean my dad is amazingly cool. All the ridiculously hilarious (and usually meaningless) videos on YouTube that have come out within the last 30 seconds, he knows about and feels necessary to show me and tell me about it.

Back to this Social Media (or whatever) I’ve started to understand. Started. It’s a bit hard to grasp at first, that’s why I’m stuck writing about how I absolutely know nothing about anything, I mean writing about what my dad does and how he knows everything about everything. So all the time, I hear my dad talking about this thing called “Plurk” and “Mixx” and “Digg” and whenever he brings these things up, I suggest making a parody of them called “Crapp“. But that never really works out.

Basically what I know about his job is that he talks to a lot of people all over the world, makes websites cool and popular (relatively speaking) and gets paid for it. Seriously. I suppose their might be more to it, but with my youthful ignorance, I see this job as a cakewalk!

And so, one day, I decided I wanted to help…boy was that a good idea. Right now he’s clickin’ and clackin’ around on his laptop, no doubt reading over my shoulder in the office. And I’m just silently frustrated, wondering why my dad couldn’t have a scuba diving equipment store, or drive a boat or at least own NASA. But, no, he does the boring job. Which really isn’t so boring once you think about it.

If you too got fed up with the whale carrying birds, then you must have turned you attention and free time to another micro-blogging platform. First came Jaiku, then Pownce, after which people started turning to Twitter. When the whale failed ashore, we turned our attention to Plurk. Not a new player has come into the scene by the name of Identi.ca.

So after hearing people talking about it, I too decided to create an account just to claim my username. It is named by many “the Twitter killer” and they are right on a certain level. It allows the federated use of the service (laconi.ca), it comes equipped with Jabber IM and OpenID support. More upcoming features include SMS, URL shortening or cross posting to similar platforms. In theory, the service is a great, reliable alternative to Twitter. Ping.fm even included their service in their system, so that you can update all the services at once.

So why haven’t you heard more of it? Why hasn’t everyone moved there? Plurk is still going strong, with traffic increasing daily, updates coming at a steady rate. Twitter works by leaps and bounds, but it does the trick at least half of the times. However, twitter has what many other similar services don’t have: the numerous active users. They might leave for a brief amount of time, while Twitter uses the newly appointed funds to improve its platform.

I for one dislike the simple interface of Identi.ca, resembling Twitter’s. I am updating my Twitter profile less and less since Plurk came along. All in all, the platform you use depends on what kind of user you are: for providing updates about your blog or simply sharing information, use Twitter; for keeping in touch with your friends on a daily basis and building your relationship, use Plurk; when others fail, Identi.ca is the backup option.

About the author:maxyRO is a social media maven, web 2.0 enthusiast, passionate writer and blogger since he first came across digg or stumbleupon. Find out more about him by checking out his blog or profiles.

I am making a live appearance on Small Business Radio, the Internet radio broadcasting arm of Small Business Trends (you can follow them on Twitter as well).

The conversation will be around the business benefits of using Plurk, which would make for interesting discussion as it is such a fresh and new service.

So save the date – Tuesday, July 1st at 1:30pm EST to listen live. You can also get your Plurk questions addressed in advance of the show by leaving a comment on ask the guest.

In a nutshell, Plurk is basically the same as Twitter but with a “timeline” thrown in. Exclusively confined to the website at the moment (there aren’t any Plurk desktop apps right now – yet), you are able to say to the world what you are doing, how you are feeling, what you want, and much more. You can even share weblinks such as YouTube videos – which are playable inside the timeline. These messages are called….you guessed it…..”plurks”.

I’ve spent a couple of days playing with Plurk and trying out the different features. At first I detested the whole thing. My first reaction was “Oh God! I hate this!” and to a certain extent, I still feel a certain negativity towards the whole thing. I guess I will never really warm to it that much, the same way I have warmed towards Twitter. But I kind of like it a lot more today than I did a couple of days ago.

So let’s start plurking!

When you are in Plurk for the first time, it will be just like Twitter – it will be quiet because you won’t know anyone (except for “PlurkBuddy” who is there to dispense some friendly advice to you). So you can click on “Interesting Plurkers” in the top right hand corner of the screen and start following some of them to get the action going on the screen.

One of the problems about Twitter is that the more people you have following you, the more unwieldy they become to manage. Plurk on the other hand allows you separate your friends into groups or “cliques” and you can send plurks to a particular clique.

So you can have a work clique, a friends clique and so on. This makes managing your friends much more easier and is one of the Plurk features that I really like.

OK, so now you have some “friends” on the screen sending “plurks” your way. Now it’s time to reciprocate and send a plurk back. So just off the top of my head, I wrote :

Once you hit “enter”, off it goes into your timeline for your friends to read and respond to if they want to. But you don’t only have the choice of “thinks”. If you hit that downwards arrow, you can also choose from verbs such as “likes”, “hates”, “is”, “shares”, “feels”, “says” and many more.

Now if you’re a Plurk friend of mine and you saw that message, thought it was the most profound thing you had ever read, and felt you just had to respond, then you just have to simply click on the message in the timeline. That opens up a reply box in which you can type a reply.

When a reply is sent, I will then see this next to your Plurk in the timeline screen :

The number in the coloured box alerts you that there are replies to your message. To read them, just click on the number and the message box expands to reveal the replies. At the bottom of the message box, you can leave your own replies to the replies, as you can see below :

Now when one of your Plurk friends leaves a new message, you will be notified by a message in the corner of your screen :

This can actually lead to one big load of stress! When you are clicking on this link, the timeline moves back and forth to where these new messages are and if you are following a lot of people, this can prove to be a bit on the stressful side, trying to keep up. I really hope Plurk finds a better way for users to receive new updates because I personally don’t like this method.

How about a RSS feed or a nice smooth drop-down list instead? Why does it have to be a back and forth scrolling timeline?

The part though where I think Plurk really kicks Twitter’s butt though is the ability to share YouTube videos and photos. As yet, you can’t do this in Twitter but you can in Plurk, simply by using the “shares” prefix and then posting the link in the box :

When you then send the Plurk to the timeline, a thumbnail appears in your Plurk and when someone clicks on it, a larger box opens up inside the timeline to reveal the photo / video. If it’s a video, it will automatically start playing. Why can’t Twitter do something like this?

One of the weird things I found about Plurk was the “Karma Points” system. You couldn’t unlock certain features until you had done certain things. So you couldn’t alter certain parts of your profile until you had accumulated some karma points or you had invited some friends to join or so on. Very weird.

You can also apparently Plurk from your instant messaging program (all major platforms supported) and there is supposed to be mobile phone support but I searched high and low to find the page for this to no avail. If anyone can point out the Plurk mobile phone set up page, please do because so far it is eluding me.

So in conclusion, Plurk is a good application with good potential which many social media junkies will enjoy. But I just haven’t been able to bond with it, the same way that I have with Twitter. But hey, each to their own. I’m not saying Plurk is bad, I’m just saying it isn’t for me. But it’ll be interesting to see where this goes in the future and if it has the staying power to compete with Twitter.

Written by Mark O’Neill