Wayne D's Blog

Over the weekend I started to hear about Plurk, the "next big thing". I am a joiner so I signed up. Now I hate to jump on the Toronto boys who have decided to try to knock Twitter off the top of the microblogging heap but in my humble opinion there is one glaring omission in their implementation. The first thing I looked for after I signed up was a method to search for people by name so I could start adding friends. Plurk did offer to read in my email address book and invite all the people in there to join up but that's not what I was looking for. I know that people I know are already on Plurk because I saw them mention it in the Twit Live chatroom. I finally ended up typing their name in the Fireox address bar after grokking how Plurk made up profile URL's. Way too much work. There is a reason Twitter has the search box at the top of the page.

The strangest thing was when I went to the Plurk team page the people who put Plurk together are shown but their cutsie icons aren't linked to their profiles. Sigh. Getting a critical mass of friends is the lifeblood of a social networking site and Plurk isn't making it easy.

My advice to the Plurkists, link to user profiles everywhere,and make is easy to search for current Plurkers. Also, don't try to get me to spam invite all my friends like some kind of rogue Facebook app until I have decided the service is worthwhile. Your karma number is a thinly veiled carrot to help you service get to a critical mass.

Good luck Plurk, Twitter has the momentum if they can keep Ruby on the Rails. You need to be three times as good and execute flawlessly if you hope to overtake them.