Plurk: Take 2

Following my first review of Plurk I ended up giving up on the service.

What annoyed me was the constants “alerts.” It’s always bugging me to let me know that there are some new plurks or there are some new responses… mainly to Plurks that I have no interest in whatsoever. In fact following more than 5 or so people suddenly becomes a chore and I found myself constantly hitting the read only button just to make things disappear.

Still, for some reason I decided yesterday to give it a second chance. The jury is still out however with the ability to mute some Plurks it seems things are moving in the right direction that will hopefully turn it into a service that is a lot less annoying that it is currently.

However at the moment Twitter is still, despite it’s ups and downs, my prefered service of choice when it comes to micro-blogging.

Plurk?

As is the way at the moment a brand new social network (at least to me) has arrived on the scene and as usual it has a strange name… Plurk

To be honest I am not sure what I would do with a new social network. I’m already signed up to Facebook, Twitter and Brightkite and I gave up my Jaiku and Pownce accounts because I never really used them. However I might as well see how I get on.

It took me three attempts to sign up after seeing some error messages on the first couple of tries. It even appear to eat my first choice of username, however I am now in.

You’re presented with an ajaxy timeline interface with “plurks” going from left to right and updated in real time. At the moment it looks clean however I only have one friend at the moment. How it will evolve when there are significantly more plurks racing along the timeline remains to be seen.

The rest of the interface seems simple although it took me a while to get use to the interface and layout of things. Loading times were also an issue but that could be down to the load placed on the service after hundreds of signups caused by Leo Laporte announcing it on Twitter.

First impressions aside i’ll keep playing with it and see what happens. At current it looks like it fills the same niche in the market as Twitter so i’ll need to ask myself will I really be using both? Shall soon find out.