Touted as an alternative to Twitter and gained a degree of popularity during a particularly horrendous Twitter-flakeage (along with friendfeed), and HOW can I blame people for pursuing alternatives?
The Interesting:
Plurk appears to take the “timeline” seriously, there is a scrolling hour display across the bottom edge of the plurkstream. The UI updates posts in a stream that spans the browser window places various individual’s updates in a left (older) to right (newer) fashion. In a way, it’s like stepping into the stream of someone’s updates.
The short “140 character” limit and a UI that taps into the expression of emotional state attached to an action give Plurk it’s micro-blog distinction.
However, there are some problematic elements:
a) The span is less than a day wide. You have to page back to see farther than 3-4 hours between posts.
b) User’s posts seem to be placed haphazardly in the “flow” – someone updates; and there’s no rhyme or reason as to where (vertically) it shows up in the plurkstream.
c) User responses attach to the original post – two things that are annoying about this… 1) you have to go back to the original post to find out what’s been said since the last post/comment… 2) you can tell *if* things have been updated, but “when” – since the overall “design” seems to convey ‘things in order’ – this does not make sense.
d) In order to update your plurkstream or see responses, you have to actually click an “update” link.
Intuitive UI improvements:
Complex or simple. It seems that Plurk has decided to take the “middle road” by making some features less accessible.
a) Just update the plurkstream. The backend is smart enough to figure out that there has been an update, so why not just post it?
Due to the nature of plurk-repsonses; requesting to view only plurks with responses makes sense, however, there is also a visual notification of a plurk-response in three ways – 1) comment number next to the plurk is updated, 2) the comment number is highlighted in red, and 3) the link in the lower left corner of the page indicating the number of responses.
b) Give users the ability to view the plurkstream via more than a couple of hours at a stretch. A single day view with an adjusted hour span would be an improvement over having to paginate backwards – even though there is a marker for “Yesterday”.
c) Vertical plurkstream… Make Sense. There does not appear to be a rhyme or reason for the location of various plurks in the vertical view. Not organized by user, not by time posted…
Usability notes:
a) Combine account and profile settings. It’s more intuitive to the user to modify aspects of their “plurk-sionality” in the same place.
b) You can scan all the way forward, but not all the way back in the timeline.
General comments:
It would be great to have more transparency between Plurk developers and the Plurk community. I’ve posted comments to the Plurk GetSatisfaction page.
Overall Plurk is an interesting little web service that allows you to view and post updates in realtime and consolidating responses to posts in a visually unique fashion. It’s got a number of other kitschy features, such as Karma – a unique bend on the Social Networking scene, time will tell if both Plurk and it’s features have sticking power.
