Plurking on the Web

If Twitterers send "tweets," do Plurkers send "urks?"

Now that Congress seems to have found Twitter, it may be time to move on. If you an get past the name, Plurk (http://www.plurk.com) is a spiffy alternative to Twitter for graphically-inclined users. About the only thing they share in common is the 140 character limit on text posts. If you regard Twitter as "business-like," Plurk is definitely fun-kee, with a slick graphic interface - a horizontally scrolling time line with annotation tools, like these predefined action verbs which allow different functions within the post:

The scrolling time line appears at the bottom (the annotation in this image was created using Jing). You may use a nickname, mine is k24x7 here. Comments and responses are appended to the original post. A one-click widget is available to be embedded in your blog or website (see the sidebar on this blog) and plurks can be automatically distributed to Twitter, Friendster, and Facebook.

At present, there are (only) 55,000+ users and the orientation is primarily toward social networking; when you sign up you are asked for your birth date and then offered a choice of plurker age-related plurker friends. All-in-all Plurk is presently more interesting for its fun interface than for its content, but has enough privacy tools so it could be used in an educational context. The Bandstand generation would say, "I'd give it an 8, it's got a good beat, you can dance to it."