Plurkaholics!

Mike Templeton launched Plurkular today, in his own words, “born early this morning after several cups of Earl Grey and staring at a full-screen Plurk timeline for several hours.”

(is there another way to launch a website, Mike?)

Mike asks a great question that can be viewed from both a business (“Plurkonomic”) and philosophical angle: we already have a bunch of plurk-related websites cropping up. Why another one?

For Mike, Plurkular is about news, apps, and fellow Plurkers. Although Mike was careful to say that Plurkular is not a competitor to anyone else out there, I think we should be as welcoming to competitors as we are about our own Plurk ventures.

This is because the more people entering a field and the more activity emerging in the field, the more we learn about the potential and utility of the field, and the more ideas we gain from each other in this field. It means the Plurk arena is robust and has high potential!

What better example than looking at Twitter, where talk these days center more around Twitter being down and unwieldy and becoming less user-friendly than Twitter as a power tool in its (pre Fail-Whale-all-the-time) heyday?

I just hope Plurk continues its growth and development, and not end up on the list of FuckedCompany.com (which, by the way, is itself “Fucked”)…

So all you Plurk-lovin’ Plurkaholic early adopter branding guru app developer just your everyday plurkin’ joe or jane,

COME ON DOWN!

(p.s. yes, I own the domains Plurkonomics.com and Twitteromics.com – if you think your business is a prime example of how its life and yours were changed by becoming plugged in to Plurk and/or Twitter, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at plurkaholics@gmail.com or Plurk me @janechin .)

Plurkerati.com made a comment that led to an interesting discussion on why I prefer Plurk over Twitter (the Plurk Page).

As I’ve noted, I’ve not engaged in conversations beyond 2 Tweets deep at Twitter, and a huge driver of my satisfaction with Plurk is I don’t have to click 10 times over 10 Tweets to follow a conversation.

A recent Plurkshop, for example, alluded to certain internet celebrities who use Twitter for announcements and to get people to visit their websites. Not a bad thing to use for Twitter, but then you don’t get much out of that beyond “hey! I just wrote this! check this out! buy my book too!”

A smart move on Plurk is that it (by design or by accident) creates a TOPIC-centered discussion not a USER-centered discussion because it can get annoying to see overt fawning of some internet guru/celebrity when he or she really has nothing new to say.

A benefit of the Plurk platform is the threaded format. I don’t need to click through all the responses (a la Twitter) to get what everyone else is saying.

I’ve noticed that there have been great questions asked on Plurk, and these have generated responses very quickly. For example: