If you've been hanging out on Sphinn recently, or keeping up with the Twitterati, you'll no doubt have heard of Plurk. It's the latest Me 2.0 site, promising a whole new world of micro-blogging, despite sharing many features with Twitter (which, I guess is now officially SOOOO 2007). Muhammad Saleem of ProNet gives it a thorough write up over at ReadWriteWeb, and is pretty positive about it. Unfortunately I'm not, so I thought I'd go over the reasons I won't be abandoning Twitter any time soon.

Like I said, Muhammad gives Plurk a very through review and seems very positive about it. I'll be honest, I've barely given it more than a couple of minute's attention, but that's one of the reasons I don't like it. 

1: It's too complicated. I'm sure that some people will argue that, as someone who to a large extent makes his living through an understanding of social media sites, I should have given Plurk some proper attention. But the thing is that, like The Charlatans, I can't even be bothered. Let me ask you this; how long did it take you to work out Google the first time you used it? or eBay? Or Amazon? No, exactly.

2: And this leads us onto the next thing that puts me off Plurk, even though it's something that Muhammad seems to see as a positive: its UI. You see, unlike most other micro-blogging services, Plurk runs horizontally, rather than vertically. Muhammad sees this as a positive:

Plurk's use of the horizontally scrolling time-line to manage lifestreams (versus virtually every other service's vertical layout) is so smart that it feels like second nature and will make it difficult to go back to other less intuitive layouts.

Again, I have to disagree. The thing that really turned me onto Twitter was the fact that I didn't have to be on the site to make use of it. Via apps such as TinyTwitter (for the Crackberry) or TwitBin (for Firefox) I could use Twitter when & where I wanted it, rather than having to actually go to the site to keep it up to date. Now I realise that Plurk hasn't had time to build up the stable of apps that Twitter currently has, but I struggle to see how this horizontal timeline will ever be suitable to 3rd party apps which allow people to make Plurk suit their needs, rather than having to make their lives fit its functionality.

3: The qualifiers. This seems to be an area where Muhammad and I agree. Unlike Twitter, which simply asks you "What you are doing?", Plurk encourages you to use one of a bunch of qualifiers to set up your "I am..." These include loves, hates, thinks, so that a Plurk may read: ciaran hates the way Plurk forces him to use a qualifier.

Muhammad dislikes these because they make him 'plurk' in the 3rd person, which remind him of the 'old Facebook status format'. Personally I still like a good Facebook status update, as it forces me to try and be amusing; but micro-blogging isn't meant to be ironic (IMO at least) and these qualifiers make Plurk a little bit too forced. Admittedly there's the option of not using one, but why put them there in the first place? 

4: The logo. I know that this is going to seem very shallow, but I'm a shallow kind of guy, and for me design matters. Plurk's logo is a dog with no head; where the head should be there's simply a bone sticking out of the neck. Nice. However it's not any sense of PETA-type righteous anger that makes me hate the logo, rather it's the feeling that it looks so bloody dated.

Back in the late 90s I lived in Australia, and spent several months in Sydney. In those days the label-du-jour was Mambo, kind of like the Aussie answer to Stüssy, if that's not a slur on Stüssy or Australia. Basically the label's raison d'etre seemed to revolve around cartoon images of dogs farting, and other such cultural gems. And Plurk's headless dogs looks like nothing more than an image the guys at Mambo thought of in 1999, but abandoned for being too damn rubbish. 

5: The name. Again I'm going to have to disagree with Muhammad on this one (which is stupid really, as he's forgotten more about social media than I'm ever likely to know, so I'm setting myself up for a fall, or even a FAIL, here). He says:

In fact, when I first heard the name I was ready to hate it, but after reading their explanation I couldn't help but love it.

• "Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk = Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: "Oh I googled this -> Oh I plurked it." Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it's catchy, snippy and sweet."

How can you not love it?

Easy. The name just makes me want to pluke. 

So, there are 5 of the reaons that Plurk is irking me right now. But the thing that really bugs me is the assumption that this site, like FriendFeed or even Twitter before it, is likely to take the 'real world' by storm. It's not.

Most people simply don't have the time, or the inclination, to catalog their lives in such immense detail, and anyone who thinks that they do is simply fooling themselves (and their clients). As we all live & work in such a goldfish bowl that we can honestly think that Twitter is about to tip, despite the fact that it still has a tiny user base, it's important that we all get a dose of reality every so often. And believing the hype about Plurk is exactly the wrong way of doing that.

Having said that, I signed up for Twitter almost a year before I got it, so expect me to be singing the praise of Plurk some time around May 2009. Maybe by then they'll have done something about that stupid bloody dog.

Ciarán is SEO & Social Media Director at British online marketing agency Altogether Digital. You can find him on Twitter & Plurk, but don't expect a reply on Plurk much before this time next year.