Plurk

Bueno voy a volver a mis viejos tiempos de posts en inglés. La idea es mandarle todo lo que surja en  este post como feedback al equipo de desarrollo de Plurk, juntando mi review con los comentarios de quienes quieran aportar. Así que si saben inglés, dejen sus comments sobre Plurk en este post!

Lets see:

Since yesterday I’m using Plurk, a new microblogging system that I consider very interesting. Sincerely twitter had me pissed off for some time now, because of its lame functioning.
The idea behind Plurk is let you share updates ala twitter, images, videos and such; but ordered on a timeline by order of appeareance from left to right. And as it doesn’t have as many users as twitter, it works smooth now..

Being using it so little, gave me a couple of ideas that would be interesting to see applied. Also, many “Plurkers” provided their opinions to share. Here are some of them:

User Interface
Timeline: Although the timeline feature is a very original way to show updates, some people find it annoying (not my case). Maybe there should be an option to let you choose wether to see updates on timeline, or in a stream like in twitter or jaiku.

Timeline orientation and position: Some users find hard to read updates from left to right. That should be customizable. Also, maybe a slider that allows us to drag the timeline height, to better see all our contacts “plurks”.

Timeline data and scroll: If you scroll waaay back to another day, you’ll realize that nothing indicates you that you’re on a different day. Also, if you’d like to go way back on the same day, you’ll have to scroll a lot. There should be an optional scroll bar that helps you to move faster.

User Profile: This is a little bit odd… you don’t have enough information from each plurker in order to decide to follow him or not. It’ll be nice to have a basic profile, and then another one with more information available.

Plurks: Sometimes there are a lot of conversations that you don’t want to follow, but you keep receiving updates from them. A very important feature will be the ability to un-follow some conversations that way you don’t get bothered by alerts.

Social
Plurkers: It’s really hard to follow or add new plurkers-friends to you profile. There should be a way to search for them by Screen Name, and then add them.
Another way to do so, would very simple: When you see someone’s comment, and you realize that you’re not following that person, you should be able to click on their screen name, and have an option to follow, or to add as a friend (among the other options that you have at the moment). That’ll do the job of having all your friends on Plurk, a lot easier!

IM & SMS: Some users told me they were experiencing some problems with the GMAIL and Hotmail integration. I’ve personally not used this feature, but that’s something to be checked out. Also there are some features as follow users and other things that are not being provided thru SMS service.
Well, those are some of my comments on these first days of use of Plurk, sure the development team will improve a lot of things as soon as they start getting some feedback from users, just like this post.

One thing I think they should really be working on is on the social aspect: twitter (or jaiku or similars) have a very strong adventage: community.
I’ve mentioned that there is no easy way to add friends or followers using Plurk. That should change immediately. If you don’t allow users to socialize and to create their own community inside Plurk, users will tend to leave the service and go back to what they are used to play with.

I don’t think that Plurk can take real advantage on twitter’s poor performance at the moment.. twitter is a huge monster, hard to defeat, but I believe that Plurk has some pretty good features that should be exploited at their maximum.

Don’t you have a Plurk account yet? Create one and add me as your friend!