This is a guest post by Rob, the admin of the Bloggeries blog directory. He is Bloggeries at Plurk.

I absolutely love Plurk. The only reason I’m actually writing this now is because the service is down and I don’t feel like doing other arguably more important stuff; at least not in the short run. Can you believe I’d rather type a bloggery about Plurk than actually use Twitter? It’s true.

I got an invite to Plurk on June 3rd and thought, “Oh great another network! I’m just getting the hang of Twitter!”. Then about 6 hours later I got another invite by a person I respect so I checked Plurk out. The first “plurk” I made was, “Can anyone read this?” I had no clue how it worked.

Within 2-5 minutes I was getting the hang of it. I have heard people say that it takes a lot of attention to learn at the beginning but I’d equate it to driving a standard-shift car: it’s slightly more things to keep track of at once but once you get the hang of it; it becomes second nature.

The timeline concept is cool but there are other things that set Plurk apart from any other network. For example, it allows you to leave threads intact with everyone’s response neatly organized. It simply does a better job at completing the feedback loop, which rewards the person who starts the thread and encourages them to Plurk even more!

I can ask a question on Plurk and get 100+ replies ranging from 1 second after I posted until who knows how far into the future. I save the plurk page and revisit the classics. They can also be revived at anytime, I believe. Where else could you ask a question and get that many legitimate replies? The karma system is a pretty cool idea. I am seeing, however’ some of the newer people with high karma by posting a lot of not very meaningful plurks that get no replies.

I think to combat any less than stellar plurks your karma score should include an average replies variable. If you constantly generate plurks that get plurked, plurked and replurked dozens or hundreds of times isn’t that of more value to the community? You are not only generating stimulating conversation that entices a response from users but also prolonging their average time on the site!

Maybe they should not even not give credit for a plurk until it reaches X replies. That way you know it was an effective plurk to some extent. That could still be gamed but might be more hassle than it is worth, which might cut down on how often it happens.

Another thing about karma is that every time there is an update everyone talks about it causing, in my opinion, an unnecessary strain on resources, giving other people slow page loads when “interesting” conversations could be happening. I understand, of course, that everyone’s opinion of what is interesting is different and worth respecting.

One way to stop this from happening would be to include, in the algorithm, a small decrease in Karma if you well use the word “Karma” more then X times. Some might say this is a dream but to someone with my coding skills Plurk itself would merely be a dream! What’s possible to the creators of Plurk we’ll never know unless we stay tuned and make suggestions.

Something else I’d like to see improved is the Plurk private message function. Currently, you get no notification whatsoever so that a private plurk, which is probably of a more personal nature, is often neglected, which could send the wrong message to the sender of the recipients intent.

I can only see plurk becoming bigger and bigger because of the concept of of threads and the other quality features they’ve built, which help us to occupy and consume our limitless and insatiable need for interaction in a wired but often nonetheless disconnected world.