A few weeks ago, I joined Plurk to mess around with the newest social media buzz. After playing around with it for a few weeks, I have really grown to enjoy many of its addictive features. The main thing I want to explain is that Plurk feels to me like a micro-forums format. Just like Twitter is a micro-blogging system, Plurk is really a micro-discussion forums platform.
Plurk works where you can post a 140 character message (a plurk) and then other plurkers can respond to your plurks. The more active you are on Plurk (i.e. more responses and replies), the more "karma" you earn. As you earn Karma, you earn more privileges, such as unique profiles, more smilie options, stars near your names and so on. Those with a lot of Karma downplay Karma, those with a little Karma desire the additional Karma. That is how Plurk encourages participation.
But participation grows more from the discussion forum like feel of the network. While Twitter has @replies as a way to respond to a twitter, it is often hard to isolate the response with the specific twitter message. Plurk threads responses directly into a specific Plurk. Here is a picture of my timeline at a specific point in time:
As you can see, the timeline shows Plurks before or after my Plurk. To reply to a specific Plurk, you click on the message and it opens up. As you can see above, that specific Plurk has several responses (as annotated by the number at the right corner of that Plurk). You can see that specific Plurk page over here and can reply there as well.
As you can see, Plurk looks and feels more like a discussion forum then a blogging format. Limiting the Plurks to 140 characters, makes it the Twitter for discussion forums. In addition, you can create "cliques" within Plurk to subgroup your friends on Plurk into categories. For example, you can make an SEO clique, SMO clique and so on. Cliques help you manage your audience so that you can send plurks to only the friends who need to be notified.
Plurk is a lot of fun and can be very addictive. It is worth exploring because it can send some traffic your way. It is all about your friends and how you use it. I am still fairly new to Plurk but join in and let's explore this tool together.
If you are going to join, please use this URL to join, so you are friended to me right away.
Forum discussion at Sphinn with the following threads:
