Is it Hallowe’en already? A fellow nlp blogger (and twitterer) pointed me to Plurk just a few minutes ago. I have been messing with Twitter’s api over the past couple days, which hasn’t been as easy as you’d think since they are suffering from massive growing pains. Fetching the public timeline takes between 5-30 seconds. However, they just got like $15 million in funding, so maybe they’ll be able to address the issue. The even bigger question is can they turn this free advertising service (which is what it is partially becoming) into a revenue stream?

Plurk is basically Twitter with a makeover and some extra social features thrown in. It still has the 140 character status update style interface, but includes a function selection for each plurk (what they call qualifiers): you can say, think, ask, wish, etc. You can also add smileys. Rather than appearing as a series of boxes scrolling down the screen, your plurks appear as floating boxes on a side-scrolling timeline. Plurks of friends also appear on this timeline and the result is a more graphical and pleasing (to me) interface. You can reply directly to other plurks in the boxes and conversations are tracked very nicely. This is far superior to twitter, which requires you to visit the other person’s timeline and wade through their tweets to find previous tweets in a thread. With Twitter being slower than a drunken monkey with three broken legs, that’s even harder.

Preview of Plurk

As my esteemed colleague pointed out, however, scaling is an issue for any service like this. Ultimately, you are bound by how fast you can access the database. If Plurk becomes as popular as Twitter (and I have every reason to believe it won’t), it will also become bogged down. Also, Plurk is just getting started and has no discernible API (unless I’m just missing it). Twitter already has quite a few third party apps.

I must say, though, I am sorely tempted to abandon Twitter in favor of Plurk just for the fact that Plurk is accessible. The massive lag of Twitter is getting to me. Of course, if no one is there to listen to my ramblings, what’s the point?