Dean Michael Berris

In the initial podcast episode of Pinoy Tech Podcast, I expressed in no uncertain terms that I didn't know what Plurk was. Soon right after the publishing of that episode, I signed up for an account. I however was not impressed. There are a few reasons why I wasn't impressed and I'll list them down here. For now, I'm sticking with Twitter and I think I might close down my account from Plurk some time soon. Again, here are a few reasons why I find Twitter more compelling than Plurk and what features I'd like to see in Twitter to blow everyone trying to be Twitter out of the water.

The Good Things

So first, let me write down that I think the good parts of Plurk are.

• The timeline view and a dynamic user interface. I really believe that one of the things going for it is a different view of the "stream" by adding the time dimension into the view. This is a nice user interface, but I think it's definitely counterintuitive. I won't take it away from Plurk though, it's a cool idea.
• Your profile information below. This minimizes the number of jumps you have to make to find out more about a person and highlight what they're saying/doing on the site prominently at the top. This is a good choice too since it allows you to fit important information within the page and present it easily to your users.
• Almost painless user interaction. Although by no means is it simple, using Plurk took me all of 30 seconds to figure out how to post something, join a conversation, and get involved in a community. It encourages conversation rather than broadcasting a message to people which I think is a nice user interaction model.

Instantly I saw why this would be something people would like to use a lot. I saw the appeal of the utility and the ease by which you can get involved. And I definitely think that the interaction model fits with internet-savvy people and those with "short" attention spans. If you have time to kill and aren't doing much and are part of a big enough network, spending hours and hours on the Plurk site seems like an attractive option over IM (which is too intrusive).

Of Course, The Bad

Given the introduction above, you're definitely going to get a list of bad things I found about Plurk. And of course, these are my opinions only.

• Bells and Whistles. Almost literally, the sounds the site makes are just annoying and jarring -- and even though I can turn them off (I think) just the thought of it defaulting to making a sound as a website is a bad thing in my book.
• CSS and Obnoxious Color. I'm giving this my "artist wannabe" eye -- anytime you encourage users to choose weird color combinations and CSS to add pictures or themes, you encourage being either truly expressive or being extremely juvenile. No, I'm not knocking on people who actually do have nice expressive plurk pages -- I'm thinking of the service as a whole.
• Missing Consistency. So you have the timeline going from left to right, but the profile information below is in three columns -- and when you want to do something you get a modal box on top of the timeline. Nothing screams information overload than mis-aligned floating nuggets of data and modal boxes and profile information all in one screen.
• Karma. Yes, the idea of karma itself is just something that would turn me off -- especially if you associate karma with activity on the site. If karma was purely handed out by other users, it would make sense -- something akin to building a meritocracy, ala Stackoverflow. But karma becomes an indicator of your activity rather than your relevance.

All in all, I find kids and people with short attention spans would generally love the idea of "real-time updates" and bells and whistles and self expression. However when it comes down to it, what really matters is communication. What Twitter emphasises is that you're communicating to the world what you're doing -- sure you can hold conversation, but conversation is better held in an IM window or in an email conversation, or better yet a phone call (or much better, a real face-to-face conversation).

Killer Twitter Feature Requests

I am no Internet entrepreneur nor am I an Internet luminary but I would like to see Twitter have the following features to really blow everyone out the water.

• Context -- If you can associate your status with a certain context (may those be tags, like what hashtags are now becoming) then I think it would add a dimension to Twitter that everyone needs. For instance, if I can tag a post to be "personal" then people reading about my technology posts can just subscribe to my "technology" context and friends might subscribe (or follow) my "personal" context.
• Groups -- If you can create groups in Twitter, this would make limiting your broadcast messages way easier. Sometime context is not enough -- being able to group your *followers* allows you to choose what kinds of updates you'll send to different kinds of groups. This effectively allows you to do "limited broadcasts".
• Conversation -- Instead of a "threaded" view of conversations, I would rather have a different kind of Twitter post, one that's mainly for conversation where comments from people that follow it can associate replies to. This is a cross between the @replies and the #hashtags people use to direct messages at. Something like the !topic so that a running conversation can be associated with a certain topic, and all the relevant responses can be viewed simply with a URL like twitter.com/<yourid>/topic/<topic>.

So I think if Twitter can pull it off, adding compelling features to the already potent communication mechanism that Twitter is allows it to grow not only as a service but also as a utility. For now, I think the current Twitter model makes it compelling -- to make it undeniable, more features, and a real business model would definitely help.

For one thing, if anybody asks, I'd pay to use Twitter like how I paid to use Pownce. Maybe a "freemium" model would help them out a lot.