The first thing I began to realize was that although Plurk has a great way of managing threaded conversations it’s also very easy to be overrun by noise. I’m guessing the idea was for ‘the ‘fans’ feature to be used more, but as it is everyone simply adds people as ‘friends’.

A couple of weeks ago however Plurk rolled out one new feature to cut back on the noise… the mute function which you can use on any Plurk conversation. It’s handy, but there is another way to cut down the noise, but going into your “Show all Friends” options you can turn off individual people’s timelines.

Karma, a good idea at first, has been a large cause of this issue as Plurking a lot rewards people with higher Karma levels. Unfortunately this also resulted in a lot of spammy responses. Plurk rolled out a new algorithm a week ago which supposedly addressed this issue but we will have to wait and see.

In the best blogging tradition a few people jumped on the opportunity and have created Plurk websites. Eric Oddom has a blog called Plurkable which is “dedicated to all things Plurk”. Updates on just about every minute Plurk event, including such riveting posts as this one from yesterday. Plurktionary is the unofficial Plurk dictionary and help guide. Plurkiverse is yet another blog on the subject, but if you are going to follow any Plurk dedicated blog I think this one covers the topic best.

Depending on adoption of course, I think we’ll start seeing a whole swag of Twitter-like services beginning to spring up around Plurk. Plurkerati is one of the first and tracks the top Plurkers based on their Karma and other stats.

What’s holding Plurk back at this point is the lack of an API, something which has been both the cause of Twitter’s success and also resulted in it’s greatest problems.

An unofficial Plurk API has been released very recently and is hosted on Google Code. It apparently has the approval of the Plurk team but not the support, it should be interesting to see what developers do with this. 

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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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