When I first wrote about my experiences with Plurk, the social media site was still very new, and I had only been toying with it for a few days. Now that its been a month, I wanted to write a follow up post.

Plurk and Twitter: The Continued Saga

Everyday I see someone on Plurk post a blog or other entry comparing Plurk and Twitter. Overall, most of the social media savvy say that the two websites are very different and not comparable.

Bitter Twitter

Are Twitter users boycotting Plurk? Its a rumor in Plurkland. Obviously, not everyone will like Plurk. The rapid pace and disjointed time line can be more than one ADD person can handle. However, many Twitter users are trying plurk on for size. The Twitter community is full of techies and early adopters, most of them will at least use Plurk before they knock it.

Plurkopia

It is true, that many "Tweeple" have left Twitter in favor of Plurk. I do not believe Plurk is stealing Twitter user. Many people have become fed up with Twitter's lack-of reliability and were bound to leave anyhow. Plurk just happened to offer a vibrant, similar experience.

Plurk has many of Twitter's good points. In fact, users often grow to love (and obsess) over their Plurkiness. Will the utopia of Plurk last? Maybe. Plurk grew quite rapidly the past few weeks and though it hasn't experienced anything like Twitter's Failwhale, there have been a number of small glitches. Is it due to over-capacity? Or is the Plurk team working hard to prevent the problems Plurk developed? Its hard to say.

Plurk Fever

Over the past month I plurked a few questions to take Plurk's temperature, so to speak. At the beginning of June I asked how people felt about the service. I asked a similar question last week. Some of the answered varied in that period of time, for example:
June 5th:

And then on June 23rd:

Many people who plurk regularly think website takes up a lot of time and becomes addicting. But more people toward the end of the month felt like they had adjusted to plurking reguarly and were enjoying it. Some commented that the interface took time to adjust to (I felt the same way). But overall, Plurkers feel positive about Plurk.

Plurking: Serious Business

I'd like to end on how I think businesses can benefit from Plurk. After discussing business ideas with an internet postcard company, I realized how much they could benefit from plurking about their concept. Most plurkers are early-adopters and many of them have a business closely tied to the internet. So if your business can be marketed to knowledgeable internet users, welcome to your perfect market! Plurk, at the moment, is mostly a niche market. Not all companies have the time to devote to social media as it is, and would not be able to build relationships with other Plurkers. But if you use the internet on a regular basis and so do your clients... isn't one of the keys to marketing, go where your clients are?

If you have also written an article about Plurk please put a link in the comments. I love reading other Plurkers views.

Tags: Business Suggestions, Marketing Your Business, Online Social Networking, Plurk, Trends

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 12:41 pm and is filed under Business Suggestions, Internet News, Trends, Veribatim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.