Plurk.com opens up

Hi Amir,

been a long time without news... Glad your project came to life !

Congrats, I think you have a great product, and people will rave about it ! But where are the ads ? How will you become a millionaire ?

Pretty cool, but it's convinced I'm female :/

gratz on the release

Oh, it's working now. Profile editing seems a little buggy though.

It's also convinced Amir is female. It has him down as male on his profile, but in the timeline view it says "amix's and her friends plurks". Also, technically, that sentence should read "amix's and her/his friends' plurks" (with the extra apostrophe after friends).

Hi Amix,

I've been using Todoist for some time and am a big fan of your work.

I really like Plurk and have a few comments you might find useful, coming from a first time user:

- What does the vertical axis mean? Even if it has no meaning, people will try to find it and be confused if they can't.

It could group by the qualifier, show plurks by the same person, or show the number of replies (more replies = higher up) or

If the y-axis doesn't mean anything, what is the point of having 2 spatial dimensions. If you're only using one, then what fundamental improvement do you make on a normal blog/twitter service which just has one (time).

- It would be more intuitive if when you dragged the timeline it kept moving after you stop dragging, like spinning a roulette wheel.

- The scale of the timeline can be a little confusing to look at because it changes to make space for the plurks. One way of alleviating this is to show day night cycles, perhaps by making the timeline's background darken as it gets later (in the person's local timezone).

- It would be useful to be able to zoom in and out

- Calling groups of friends cliques might be an issue because that word has very negative connotations, at least in the UK. It implies a group of people who are really tight but also unfriendly and unwelcoming towards outsiders. Because of this, people generally don't like to be identified as being part of a clique.

Anyway, keep up the good work. And good luck!
Raph

Like it. Much better than Twitter, which I've never been able to get into...

Keep it up!

How long until we get an API? One of the biggest successes with Twitter has been exposing an API so that people can write desktop clients and the likes.

Hi Amir,
this looks pretty cool, congrats!
However, there's something with the timeline that doesn't sit well with me.
It's proven that most people perceive time flow from left to right and Plurk's is quite opposite.
Just after taking a look at time markings below I realized that I was reading Plurks wrong way and that was just confusing.
I realize it's a design issue too, but think about it...

Nice app. I'll give it a whirl.

You have a typo on the front page though. It should be "Too much hassle and have no..." on http://plurk.com/

@Pascal:
The idea is to create something that people want :)

@Al:
That's a bug, thx for the notification.

@Raph:
Plurks are sorted by popularity on the y-axis (more replies = higher up). Roulette wheel drag isn't suitable as you have to fetch data and with roulette wheel drag one would have to fetch lots of data.

@Tomislav:
If we did it from right to left, then we would have issues regarding overflow for new plurks. Anyway, this may be confusing for some, but generally we haven't had many complaints about our timeline ordering.

> The idea is to create something that people want :)

Yes of course, but if Plurk gets adopted by millions of teenagers (like I think it will), the server expenses will become heavy.

I've read again your previous post about becoming a millionaire:

http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/...

Does it mean that Plurk won't stay free ?

Plurk is a different application. We have of course different ideas on how to create a buisness model, but this info is disclosed.

> We have of course different ideas on how to create a buisness model

Good. If free, I'm sure that Plurk will be a success. I wouldn't be so sure if you asked the users to pay...

How much are you going to have to spend on database servers? That is a joke. I'm sure everyone's learned a good lesson from other social web apps. Plus your team seems very competent.

I would think if you were going to charge for extra features, people would just switch to alternate free web services.

That's not to say you couldn't or won't make a million from Plurk. There are countless ways to make from it, and
I wish you the best of luck! Plurk definitely has potential.

thank you very much

Thanks for the great share, however I'm much more for Twitter after observing Plurk

I really like Plurk, I think it is an awesome service.