So …. Plurk. No, I did not just use onomatopoeia to recreate the sound of dropping a wet wash cloth, Plurk, a combination of People +Lurk, and Play + Work is a short format lifestream social medium.
Lifestreaming a la Plurk
With Plurk users can document the things they are thinking, feeling, asking, sharing, wondering and many other ”qualifiers” in a chronologically organized graphical user interface.
Users can earn Karma for their own and their friends’ activity on the site. Earning Karma can bring rewards such as emoticons and some other rights, such as naming conventions. If you don’t plurk frequently enough, your karma decreases, as well as if you attempt to friend someone and they decline friendship.
While Twitter is still the biggest kid on the short format block, Plurk has garnered some attention lately from tech-bloggers such as CNET and SomewhatFrank. But Plurk-user Bloggeries contends that Plurk’s certain je ne sais quoi is Cliques: a method of grouping some of your contacts and friends into a quick and easy assembly that you can quickly share plurks with.
Some might say they have social networking fatigue with the plethora of BrightKites, Blip.fms, Twitters, Facebooks, MySpaces, Tumblrs, Pownces and Plaxos, and after looking at so many, I am inclined to agree with those folks, but there is always going to be room for improvement on how we get together on the Internet, so the search must go on.
