Plurk is the latest micro-blogger site following in the footsteps of Twitter, Jaiku and Pownce. I heard a lot of talk about it on twitter and thought I would check it out.

Yes, I signed up for a plurk account the other day and gave it quick run through. I didn’t like it.

Right of the bat the UI is really, really unattractive to me. I really hate side scrolling and Plurk makes you do an awful lot of it. How does their timeline UI work when you have Scobl-ish Leo Laporte-ish numbers of followers?

Finding and adding a friend on Plurk is not easy. Where the hell is the search? Currently you can only find new friends by importing them from another social networking site or by emailing them an invite. Fail.

The emoticons are not good, they look cheap and childish. I always disable them in any software that uses them but in Plurk I can’t get away from them.

The ability to share youtube videos and flickr pictures is great although I don’t like being limited to only youtube for video. This is much better than uploading a file (as in Pownce) since it allows me to use data from one service within another. And I like that.

I have some smaller gripes but these are basically gripes that I have will all web 2.0 sites:

• No Open ID Support.
• No G/Wavatar support
• Limited or no data portability

Will I switch? No. Although Plurk has attractive features like sharing videos and pictures from other services and a mobile interface I still can’t get over the timeline UI or the lack of search. I expect that Plurk will be revisiting their UI relatively soon and hopefully their name along with it.

plurk · review