A little context where this review is coming from: Given the recent, ummm, "uptime challenges" at Twitter (My profile: pierrefar), there was a massive flurry about another service called Plurk. So much was Twitter down and so many cool people moved over to Plurk that I joined the fun and set up an account.

A few days into this exodus of sorts, Brian asked who was still around on twitter, and I replied that I didn't like it so was still around. Surprised, Brian suggested I give Plurk a second chance and so I agreed. Plurk got a second look, and I promised Brian a review. This is the review.

In short: it's bad, and not only that, I think they won't make it as a company with the product with its current interface. Here is why.

What is Plurk?

Plurk is a service for engaging in conversations with other people. It is centered around a timeline, a very cool looking scrolling interface that maps conversations as points on the timeline. The conversations start with someone posting some text and the replies come in attached to the original reply. A screenshot is below:

The timeline's 'now' is at the left, and the past is going to the right. When you're browsing past conversations, you scroll left to go to later ('future') posts. At first pass, this is very counter-intuitive: for some reason I expect the future to be to the right and you go back in time by scrolling left - i.e., the reverse of the Plurk arrangement. I've seen other comments along those lines but I can't for the life of me find them. However, this is the best arrangement for a timeline written in English, and Plurk either are genius designers or extremely lucky people. Why? English is written left to right and so as you scroll the first thing you see of a new conversation is the starter's name and the first few words in the sentence of the conversation. If you were scrolling right to left, you would actually see the last few words in the conversation's start's sentence. The Plurk arrangement works much better.

The conversations themselves are shown as little rectangles. You click on the rectangle and it expands to show the full conversation and replies. The layout is a forum thread layout with avatars, usernames, time stamps, and icons. The rectangles are placed along the time line in relation to when the started, and plotted at randomly in the vertical position.

Plurk also has karma, that eternal currency of Web 2.0. The more you use Plurk (start conversations) and the more people you invite, the more karma you get. And the more karma you have the more icons you get. However, if you don't use Plurk for a day, the karma starts dropping. I peaked at 20+ karma about 2 weeks ago and now I'm under 8 karma. It's an interesting twist to an age-old way to foster user engagement.

Why is Plurk Bad?

Plurk is a bad service because the timeline arrangement is the worst implementation to show conversations. There is absolutely no need to have conversations plotted in a timeline. A simpler listing (the extreme of which is a forum-index type of listing) would do much better. Right now, the timeline mars the usability relating to the fact that Plurk is about conversations and not microblogging like Twitter is. It's a gimmick and an annoying one for that.

To know just how annoying this is, try not going to Plurk for a few days and come back. Heck, go to sleep and check it in the morning: you'll have dozens of conversations that have either been started or updated and you can't just seem them and quickly browse them. No, you have to scroll, click each one to expand it, and then read. And there isn't any obvious way to see which conversations were ones you engaged in previously to see if there are any new replies. Nope, they're all lumped together. Raise your hand if you simply just gave up and marked all conversations as read because you just can't be bothered.

And what's with the karma loss? Listen, I try to have a life outside the internet and certainly won't center my life around Plurk. If I don't visit for a day or two, I should not feel like I'm being punished. This is the first time I see anyone implement a karma loss over time idea. Karma should only be deducted if other members of the community feel that way, and even then, it should be implemented carefully - there is no easy answer for this question, but Plurk's implementation is definitely wrong.

Finally, a pet peeve from a marketing point of view: I get an email every time someone wants to follow me so that I can authorize them. Ummm, I love it for people to follow me and they shouldn't ask permission. They should come and go as they please. Twitter called it spot on: people follow you and stop following without intervention, but there are two options: you can lock your conversations or you can use direct messages which are private. That covers pretty much all shades of having an open to private conversation. Having a single blanket permission system by default is weird.

So all in all, a very crappy implementation of a potentially good idea. I've written it off for now but I'm sure my network of friends on Twitter and elsewhere will let me know if things improve or not.