Plurk traffic grows 9x in June
July 11, 2008 – 1:48 pm by Griffin HammondCompete reports that Plurk, a new micro-blogging site and competition for Twitter, saw a 929% increase in traffic in June, probably due to all the downtime Twitter users have experienced in the past month.
I figured I should try out Plurk, but when I first went to the site, it was down. Go figure! Today I tried again, and had better luck.
Here’s the good:
- Plurk has a really clean graphical interface and offers a different way to look at friends’ updates: in a horizontal timeline form. Worth checking out.
- Without entering a zip code, Plurk automatically located me and listed my location.
- Plurk provides a choice of color-coded “modifiers” (actually verbs) to go between your username and message. (i.e. “griffinity asks what’s cool about plurk? or griffinity shares blog.mediasocialist.com) Because each verb shows up as a different color, it’s more visually apparent which type of update someone has made.
- If you link to an image or YouTube video, Plurk includes a thumbnail in your post. You can even view the full image from within Plurk.
This is what makes me like it less:
- Plurk awards “Karma” points for posting plurks, responding to others’ plurks, and inviting friends. It turns micro-blogging into a game of frivolous spamming and annoying others.
- There’s a customizeable widget, to embed on your website, but it must be a work in progress. Currently the link brings up the widget, but no code for implementing it.
- One of Twitter’s widgets is text-based, so you can seamlessly integrate your status into your website. With Plurk, you have no choice but to use their graphical design. This renders it mostly useless for me.
The real test for Plurk will be if its infrastructure can handle such explosive growth better than Twitter has done. A site has to function most of the time for users to stick around.
To see how it looks, check out my Plurk page.
