Just Too Much Wurk to Plurk

The new hotness in social media today is Plurk , a "social timeline" of sorts. Being the lemming social media blogger that I am, I hopped on over to the site to try it out after seeing @geekmommy and others Twittering about it. I must admit my initial impression is one of being completely underwhelmed.

First, the interface is cluttered, which I dislike intensely in any social media site. Social media is inherently noisy, and sites like Plurk, and the even messier and more fragmented Scoble favorite FriendFeed , don't help filter the noise to a manageable level. 

Saying that finding your way around the web based around people instead of topics is fine on paper, but so far the implementation on sites that do this is a complete turn off.  Plurk is no exception to this problem.

The only thing easy about Plurk is signing up - after that it is all an uphill battle to navigate the site, find people to make your friends and otherwise make use of this new toy. Why toy? Because I simply don't see any real world use for a social timeline, especially when sites like FaceBook already give you a way to do this. Heck, even FriendFeed does it better, and that is hard to believe.

Plurk also has already had scalability issues. In yet another example of a web site or service that plans to offer social media not being ready for actual use, Plurk has already gone down a number of times today. They have even had to turn off some features, like photo uploading to profiles, to help stay afloat.

In this restless social climate that follows in the wake of Twitter' s downtime and scalability woes, a newly launched beta flat out can not afford to take a single faltering step. One moment of downtime, or one issue with use, and the same people who made Twitter such a success and became so loyal to it will bail on you faster than rats on a sinking ship.

It is already happening with Plurk. Without a clear direction for using the site, no easy way to add people to your friends list, no way to determine how it might be useful to you, and issues like usability, Plurk is already getting negative feedback on Twitter and even on its own site.

Some people like the theme editing features. The way it bunches conversations together is interesting, but still a little too much work for me. I think combining some features of Plurk with FriendFeed might address some of the issues I have with FriendFeed, however - the two sites might work to make one whole.

I'll keep my Plurk account open for a while and see if it fixes its issues. I'm especially interested to see how, or if, the company powers that be address the problems and the negative feedback being bandied about on this, the first leg of their open beta launch. As it stands, I am not likely to make Plurk an active part of my internet experience without significant improvement in the noise level and the ease of use factor.