How does Plurk work?

Are you as sick of hearing about Twitter as I am?

See the problem is that I never really “got” Twitter… I tried, I really did. I signed up and followed people and Twittered regularly, but it never really did it for me. Eventually I just forgot about it.

Enter Plurk.

Considering micro-blogging isn’t something I’ve really got into you may be surprised I wanted to introduce you to this service. Some say it’s just a better featured Twitter clone, but I think it has a great deal more potential then that.

It’s got a wicked name for a start.

No seriously, the name is actually brilliant. It manages to sound suitably web 2.0 without taking a killing the consonants and even works perfectly as a verb. Check out how they explain 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.

I agree.

It also demonstrates the sites tongue-in-cheek sense of humour, something which actually works in this case… *ahem* Sphinn (“Stop right there! We’re going to have to see some ID”). In fact the Plurk blog is quite entertaining and worth a read.

You’ll find a nice attractive UI which features a colour scheme very similar to the WordPress dashboard. Here is an image of what to expect:

As you can see I have no contacts so it’s not very fun at the moment, I would like to test drive the service properly so so why don’t you join up and try it out too!

One particular element I’m liking is the horizontal orientated timeline, rather then the vertical focus of most services. I’ll be interested to see how it’ll handle a lot of contacts because having to scroll across and down to view “plurks” will be a pain.

Anyway, this isn’t just a Twitter-plus-more-features start-up, it’s a whole new take on micro-blogging and social networking in general.

Expect it to be big soon!

(If not, just expect it to be in TechCrunch’s Deadpool by early next week)

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