The service is similar to the Election 2008 product rolled out by Twitter last month in that it parses through “plurks” (the equivalent of “tweets” on Twitter), and filters out those messages related to Obama, McCain, Joe Biden, and Sarah Palin. The other component of this new “Plurk the Vote” campaign is that users gets to set up their own mini-elections.

The user who attracts the most number of votes will receive $5,000. So far the majority of Plurk users appear to be liberal. 84 percent are voting for Obama and 16 percent are voting for McCain. Apparently undecided is not an option on this poll! Adding political features is clearly a trend in the social media space. C-Span launched Debatehub, Facebook launched a registration application, and of course Twitter launched Election 2008.

This is one more site to add to the mix. Plurk has continued to grow rapidly but most of that growth appears to be abroad. Alexa.com shows the site is growing at a furious pace whereas Compete.com shows the site has been on the decline domestically for the past few months. Are you on Plurk? Do you use the service frequently?

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This is one more step toward providing the full set of features provided by Twitter, which can’t seem to stay online as of late. Tamar Weinberg suggests that Plurk shouldn’t event be compared to Twitter though since it’s extremely noisy with their current timeline format. I think that with the addition of text support and alternative timeline views, we could have a new competitor to Twitter.

For the time being I am split between the two services but I have become increasingly attracted to Plurk as I receive many more replies for everything I write on there versus Twitter. You might even call me a plurk evangelist at this point given that I’m the second highest ranked plurker in Washington, D.C. I also appear to be the 354th highest ranked plurker overall.

Such an honor to be among the top ranks on plurk! Just as on other sites, I think the most important issue will be how to develop systems that most effectively cut through the noise. At this point it is no longer easy to track all the conversations on Plurk, FriendFeed, Twitter or pretty much any other site that I’m a member of. Have you found more effective ways for filtering through the noise generated by these new services?

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This morning when I woke up, the first site I checked out was Plurk. I might be a Plurk addict now but when I loaded the site, it wasn’t functioning properly. I couldn’t update my status and eventually I was prompted with the following error:

I was a little shocked that only 2 days after I started using the service, it was already having scaling issues. Twitter regularly has issues and back when MySpace became popular it was also down every few hours. If you provide a free and useful service, I’m beginning to think that reliability is not as important. While people become frustrated, with not having access to a site, they will still come back later and try again.

According to Compete.com, Twitter saw continued growth last month despite their substantial downtime. So do you think social media site downtime really matters or is it just a bunch of loud people complaining about nothing?

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Not until I read a blog post by Muhammad Saleem yesterday on ReadWriteWeb did I decide to go check it out. I signed up and immediately started using the service which provided a whole new interface for the same thing that Twitter provides. The only difference is the way that conversations are grouped ultimately providing for much more dynamic conversations.

The majority of my conversation revolved around the act of “Plurking” but in the process I did notice that a lot of the people that I currently follow on Twitter are also on Plurk. One additional benefit of the service is the ability to share pictures and videos directly from within the service. Two other interesting features of the site are karma points (which grade you for your volume of activity on the site) and the reply conversations which show replies grouped together.

The real question here is how many of the microblogging solutions can we really use? I jumped on the opportunity to add a lot of friends and since then I have close to 200 but that’s really not the important thing. Are we all just testing out these systems as early adopters or are we choosing to help build the user base of the ones we like? As far as I know Twitter was sufficient but once Plurk came along there were some things we liked about it.

I’ll keep trying out Plurk for a little longer but honestly I could live with Twitter alone. Have you tried out Plurk? Do you see much value in using the service?

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