Those of you who converse with strangers daily or who work from home will probably “get it”: there’s more to social media than just voting for an online friend’s article or broadcasting something on Twitter. What is that “more”? Social media conversation, thanks to web applications such as Plurk. Plurk takes Twitter’s communications paradigm in a more complex direction, adding in a host of features, an interesting interface, and the opportunity to build professional relationships.

So much has already been written about Twitter and its value to freelancers, marketers, artists and more. But Plurk is a new addition to the growing number of “my day in 140 characters” web communications applications such as Pownce, Jaiku, and Hictu. (Though Hictu differs from the group by offering the choice of text, audio or video messages and responses.)

Some people have likened Plurk to the MySpace of microblogging. While there seems to be a far more casual atmosphere in Plurk (at least in my stream), there is still much professional value to most people who utilize Twitter on a daily basis. It’s a matter of deciding what you need from Plurk and finding it.

Plurk Features

Plurk is quite different than Twitter for a number of reasons:

1. Horizontal timeline interface.
   It’s a bit off-putting if you’ve never used “timelines”, but you do get accustomed to it. In fact, once you do get used to it, it’s easy to quickly browse a stream of plurks and decided where you want to participate in the conversation.
2. Threaded conversations.
   This is where Twitter is lacking. Plurk offers threaded responses, like a chain of comments in blogs or forums. Without this, there’d be no conversation.
3. Fan or Friend.
   You can either “follow” or “friend” another plurker. Following lets you see a users’ plurk threads in your timeline. Mutual friending is the same but accords extra benefits, including the ability PM (Private Message) someone. The “fan” mode is the same as Twitter’s “follow”.
4. Familiar IM windows.
   While the timeline interface might be new to you, the IM-like windows that popup when you click on a thread (yours or someone elses) to respond should be familiar. So your Plurk timeline is like a having access to a series of near-realtime chat sessions.
5. Cliques for private groups.
   Here’s where Plurk resembles a forum, functionally speaking. You can set up a clique (private group) and add people. (Though you should ask them before doing so, as some people are upset about being added unawares.) This allows for group chats without being visible to other plurkers.
6. Karma points.
   Karma points are the one feature which many plurkers seem to feel is frivolous and annoying. Points are calculated in a complex formula. Increased points give you access to additional emoticons, as well as the ability to customize your timeline display. But if you don’t use it, you lose it, and have to rebuild. If you’re trying to get on “top 10″ plurk user lists, like Plurkmania, having high karma points helps because of all the reasons you get karma.

What I’ve Gotten Out of Plurk

It is these differences that I feel make Plurk much more valuable than Twitter to some users. For example, this is my experience with Plurk so far, after 5 weeks of use:

1. Found a community of freelance writers, designers and coders who share interesting links and a great deal of support. For those freelancers who work at home, you know that support from non-existent colleagues is of course non-existent. Purkers do an excellent job of making up for this lack.
2. Found blogging colleagues from elsewhere and have gotten to know them better.
3. Found new friends, including a few who might be ideal as actors for my future horror movies.
4. Found other filmmakers whom I’m hoping might share some of their knowledge.
5. Am part of a couple of “cliques”, where we’re free to discuss topics privately without being part of the public timeline.
6. Found a very responsive community of “friends”. No matter what I ask, someone will almost always respond, though time zones of friends do play a factor.

As a result, Plurk has been valuable to me as a freelancer and to drum up interest in my upcoming ebook, book and DVD projects, not to mention my future films. I’ve also done a bit of informal polling, which gives me a bit of insight into certain topics. It does help if you have many hundreds or thousands of people following/ friending you, but you have to start somewhere.

Plurk Downsides

Now, Plurk is lacking in a number of ways, depending on your point of view. To wit:

1. The timeline interface.
   I didn’t like it at first, like many of my Twitter colleagues, and it took a fair bit of time to get used to.
2. Lack of an API.
   This is coming soon, though.
3. Lack of desktop clients. Possibly due to no API, though this will change very soon as well.
4. Lack of complex filtering.
   To save time, it’d be nice to to see only threads you’ve participated in. This will change in future versions, as well as when desktop clients get released.
5. Addiction to the application.
   Because of the way it’s set up, its timeline paradigm, and lack of complex filtering, some plurkers say they often have a hard time getting away to do actual work. I am exploring ways of conquering this, some of which are shared below.
6. Casual plurking mixed with professional.
   Possibly an equal split of users who use Plurk for fun or professionally, compared to Twitter, which seems very professional by comparison. Though this is what makes Plurk seem so much friendlier than Twitter, where even people with 1000+ followers indicated that no one seems to answer them.
7. Lack of support team.
   Emails to the Plurk team seem to go unanswered, based on (small) number of people who said their “contact us” attempts got no response. After over 14 days, I gave up assuming that the team would respond to an urgent issue potentially affecting many plurkers.
8. Downtime.
   In a global village, it’s hard to find down-time, but it always seems that Plurk is upgraded at the most inopportune times. Weekdays are just not a wise time to upgrade a web application. Then there are the issues with Amazon S3 brownouts that affect Plurk as well - though downtime hasn’t been anywhere nearly as big a problem as for Twitter.

Still, for my current work, Plurk has been far more valuable to me than Twitter. The fact that people respond is a big part of that value. Whereas on Twitter, I’ve had more followers but nearly no responses.

How Freelancers Can Get the Most Out of Plurk

If you have little time and/or patience for conversations, Plurk is not for you. Stick with Twitter. Many people say it: Twitter is for broadcasting, Plurk is for conversation. Yet if you value social media conversation, you can get a lot of professional benefit from Plurk by refining how you use it.

1. Choose your battles.
   Don’t feel the need to view ALL responses to ALL threads plurked by users in your timeline. Otherwise you will quite literally get no work done. Plurkers understand this and won’t be offended.
2. Be on the clock.
   Do what works best for you, but to avoid plurk addiction, try different plurking schedules. Some users like to plurk in the morning, at lunch, and after dinner. Others plurk for 5-10 minutes every hour. Some only plurk in the morning and at night, for an hour or two.
3. Navel-gaze.
   Plurk has three handy tabs: All plurks, My plurks, Private plurks. If you’re rushed for time but want to check for private plurks or responses to your plurks, use the latter two tabs. You can always check your full timeline when you have time later on, or the next day.
4. Limit who you follow.
   That sounds anti-social, but if people have their own reason to follow you, that doesn’t mean you have to follow them. I’d still encourage it, but you can delay that decision until later.
5. Use cliques.
   In a similar vein, if you have the need to create a private clique, then viewing subsequent private threads becomes as easy as clicking the “Private plurks” tab.
6. Don’t worry about karma points.
   On the flipside, there are professional reasons to be concerned with karma: (1) Ability to customize your profile page, possibly to add logos; (2) presence on various “top 10″ lists, which can not only build your following but also send traffic to any site you list on your profile page.
7. Avoid time-zappers.
   See the section Plurker Types to Avoid, further below.
8. Get a desktop client.
   If you don’t like the horizontal timeline interface of Plurk (and many of my Twitter colleagues do not), Plurker will soon offer a desktop client with a vertical timeline, similar to Twitter clients such as Twhirl. It’ll have time-saving features such as letting you see only those old threads you’ve participated in, as well as finding threads that mention you. It’s also likely that once Plurk releases their API, other desktop client options will appear.

How to Build a Following on Plurk

Plurk is intended to be a conversational medium, and you get “karma points” for “having fun” with it. That can mean building a following slowly or rapidly. While some really well-known bloggers have leveraged their blog’s popularity into a huge Plurk following in just a few weeks, most of the rest of us have to achieve this from scratch:

1. Start with people you know.
   Follow someone you know online, or persuade real-life friends to join. There are “find your friend” features in Plurk, though the app is in beta and some of these are quirky.
2. Watch the Interesting Plurkers timeline.
   If you see an interesting thread or response on the Interesting Plurkers timeline, click on the user’s profile link and browse their timeline (alone or also with the plurks of their friends). If you like what you see, fan or friend them.
3. Follow someone local to you.
   In the Interesting Plurkers timeline, there are options to change who you see there, either by geography, age, sex, or language. This is a good option if you’re the shy type, because you mentally claim geographic loyalty.
4. Plurk unto others.
   Hey, if you never participate in other plurkers’ threads, why would you expect them to participate in yours, much less even follow you? The fact is, they won’t actually even “see” you otherwise.
5. Apply six degrees of separation.
   One of the brilliant features of Plurk is that you and person B could participate in a plurk thread by person A and without currently following each other, interact. If you keep seeing person B in various threads, you might decide to follow them and they you. It’s a great way to make new Plurk friends. For example, you’ll find a fascinating crew of people in my threads.
6. Ask.
   What could be simpler? If you’ve established a few friends but want more, say, freelancer friends, ask for recommendations of suitable plurkers.
7. Promote yourself.
   List your Plurk profile link on Twitter, or write blog posts about Plurk and list your link.
8. Use a plurk widget.
   Plurk has a widget or two that you can display on your website, blog or some profile page somewhere. It’ll show your recent plurk threads, along with the number of responses. (Just consider, though, that if you’re displaying the widget on your professional site, be concerned with the non-professional topics that might appear.)

Note: To keep control of their timeline, some of the veteran plurkers say they first “fan” someone, and if they’re “interesting”, will friend them later. Other plurkers “fan” you first, and if you “fan” back, they then “friend” you. If you turn down their friend request, they lose karma points. The same rule applies to you. Also, if you get blocked, unfollowed or unfriended, you lose karma points.

Plurker Types to Avoid

There are numerous web workers using Plurk, and many are freelancer writers, designers, coders, filmmakers, videographers, editors, publishers, musicians, artists, online marketers, and so on - just as with Twitter. There are also “lurkers”, bored people, casual conversationalists, plus a few plurkers who’ll sap your energy. If only to limit the time you spend plurking, here are some Plurker types you might want to avoid:

1. My butt hurts.
   The whiny type who never plurk anything but what’s wrong with them at this very moment. This type almost never has any responses in their plurk threads and rarely participate in other threads. They often don’t follow/ friend you back.
2. I’m in your face.
   This type only has rude, nasty or cynical things to say, and never in a playful way. They sometimes also complain about how they’ve been wronged by other plurkers.
3. Look at me, I’m important.
   This type often uses Plurk like Twitter, never answering your questions, and rarely conversing in other plurkers’ threads. (In partial defense, some of these plurkers have tons of “friends” and seem to get away with this lack of interaction. Some don’t mind others responding, but haven’t the desire and/or time to respond to anyone they don’t know.)
4. Emotion/ energy vampires.
   You won’t know these types until it’s too late, and you’ll have to unfriend them. Though some of them will point out to others how you unfriended them despite their dozens of Plurks asking new friends not to ever unfriend them.
5. Rabble rousers.
   Admittedly, there’s still a lot of this in me from my youth, but it’s not something I do constantly. You’ll need to make your own judgement, if you come across a perpetual rabble rouser.
6. Perpetual pollsters.
   Some pollsters are very entertaining, asking interesting and relevant questions about current issues, and they mix this in with other types of plurking. But one type of pollster asks the strangest questions with the strangest choices, often calculated to generate a response from numerous people (which of course builds lots of karma points).
7. Vagueness peddlers.
   I routinely ignore threads that only say something vague, like “I hate/like this.” If you don’t respect your friends enough to specify what in your plurk, I’m not wasting time checking the thread of responses.

Let me emphasize that these people are not “bad,” per se. There is a more casual atmosphere to Plurk than Twitter, and (most of) these peple do have their followers. But if you need to limit your interactions to the professional, then following the above types might be a bad idea. To a degree, everyone might do something like the above once in a while. That’s tolerable. (In fact, I’ve done it on purpose, to gauge reaction.) It’s the ones who are like this constantly, and whose plurks just waste your time that you might want to avoid. While you could set up two different accounts with no overlap in the people you follow/ friend, that seems like more effort than necessary.

Plurker Types to Look For

There are so many informative and/or entertaining plurkers whose threads are a must for me. Some offer a refreshing counterpoint to “all business” topics, others enterain or share. While some do plurk of their difficulties in life, many of them do it with such good nature and sometimes with such lyrical skill in the wording that a “tale spinner” such as myself cannot help but want to follow. I follow a mix of plurkers including other freelancers, artists, online marketers, the Knitting Mafia, and lots of casual users I’m happy to have interacted with. Who you decide to follow has to be based on what you want out of Plurk.

Final Thoughts

Obviously, a service such as Plurk will not appeal to everyone. Some people only want/ need to Twitter. One of my own personal goals is to “interact” with over two million people in my lifetime, so I value services like Plurk over Twitter. If you value conversation in social media, I recommend giving Plurk a try.