Plurk unwrapped
Last week we launched Plurk - a social journal we have been working on for the past 6 months.
There are already a bunch of social networks out there and some compare and contrast are bound to happen. That’s ok. I do want to share some personal thoughts about the kind of social networking problems Plurk is trying to solve.
The current model of using a social network, loosely speaking, is you add a friend and then you forget about her until maybe she takes a naked picture of herself jumping beside a hot spring during her visit to Yellowstone and posts it on the network. Either that or she is posting pictures and poking every one of her friends every single day and you get notified about it, every single day. So there’s this constant level of ‘either idle or noise signals’ that comes with current social networking model. Some friends take a more dominant role over others, regardless of who is actually more important to you in real life. Getting the balance right requires high maintenance of your privacy settings, filter options and whatnots. Luckily, under most circumstances, this problem can be solved by email and IM chat. But after a while they aren’t really helping. With IM, there’s always this mental obligation to reply right away. With email, you can never get a reply right away.
There has to be a better way to connect with your friends. Users want so badly to derive more values out of their social networking experience.
Plurk is trying to be that better way. A constant update of life, of people you care enough about to want to know what they’re up to everyday. There are many ways to utilize a social network. For some it’s a popularity contest. For others it can be an event planner or a career connection, or those three together. If you provide a more focused avenue for people to do all these things and connect with others, instead of just ‘here’s how you add a friend, send a message and upload your profile picture’, then you are helping people to connect better, I believe. Short messages is Plurk’s focused avenue.
Maybe I’m wrong. This won’t be the first time :).
