The Social Journal v. What Are You Doing
I stumbled upon an interesting read today, comparing Twitter and Plurk.
Ed Rowan mentions in his latest blog post that Plurk in content-centric while Twitter is user-centric.
While true to a point and besides the technical difficulties that Ed relates, I won’t be going to Plurk for my daily interaction. Here’s why.
Audience
In all certainty, Plurk is a sleeper in the micro-blogging today. It is the tool that has gained the more traction behind the heavyweight master that Twitter is. Does it make it a success? I doubt it.
Just read the taglines of the two services. Twitter gets to the point: “What are you doing?”. It’s a conversational tool, for friends and co-workers. Wishful thinking maybe, but it gets the job done. It’s simple, to the point. 140 characters and nothing more.
Plurk, on the other hand, defines itself as a social journal and only mentions what can be described as the fun part of micro-blogging. Yes, Facebook did that too when it started, but has now gone from a pure college-friendly tool to a more complete service where mostly everyone wanting to can find a niche.
Design
No fuss for Twitter, did I just mention. Calls for more have not been answered, except from search (and maybe some OAuth coming soon after the phishing debacle permitted mostly, it must been said, by naive Twitter user -since when do you give your credentials in the wild?-). Everything else rests on what I call the Twitter Economy, services ranging from trending to retweet ranks, from attempts to define authority to feeding services, from desktop & mobile apps to grouping tool.
Even FriendFeed gets more and more users for the commenting synchronization that it allows.
When you take a look at your Plurk page, it’s another story. You get Karma, you get a nice-looking, if somewhat difficult to follow, “stream” of entries. Yes, I do love the fact that entries and answers are, in a way, threaded, or content-centric, like Ed says, but the whole thing around is distracting. It’s fun to be there, but doesn’t allow me to get my job done, which is broadcasting and communicating not only with friends, but mainly with people interested in the same area as I do.
Where’s the money
In the end, the fate expecting all the micro-blogging platforms will depend on their ability to monetize their services. Twitter is the only one I see that actually gets a shot, for its network effect (the sheer number of users is growing day by day) but also for the whole array of services it has allowed to be created around it.
It’s not rock-solid, but it’s a whole economy that people wish to use, whatever the complaints coming along every second day.
Niche
Maybe, just maybe, Plurk could find a niche market for itself. Since it has not profiled itself towards any business use, I would say that the whole corporate world is off. The Plurk funny way of micro-blogging might attract a young audience and, in the end, allow it to be bought by a bigger player wishing to either jump on the micro-blogging bandwagon or integrate a status-like service to what it’s already offering.
Time will tell.
You can find me on Twitter, Plurk and Friendfeed.
