I decided to try Plurk since my colleague and friend, Geoff Livingston, recommended it to me. The micro-blogging site chronicles your thoughts and activities and presents them in a time-line fashion. Although very similar to the infamous Twitter – and maybe even better than Twitter – Plurk offers a variety of perks like emoticons and a choice of pre-set verbs for your instant messaging. You can also share YouTube videos and pictures from various sites, including PhotoBucket and Flickr.

Cool features of Plurk include Karma points and cliques. The points represent how actively you’re using Plurk. The more points you accumulate, the closer you are to achieving Plurk Nirvana. Additionally, some aspects of your profile, such as your profile name and your profile title can only be filled out only after you accrue a certain number of Karma points. The cliques are exactly what it means. People are able to categorize their friends into groups like co-workers, best-friends or even to a fantasy basketball league.

Buzz Meter Ranking: 3 out of 4 Buzz Bees

Positive: Plurk offers an abundance of fun tools all in one site and also allows instant ‘plurking’ to your cell phone. It is a good alternate to Twitter.

Negative: Even though Plurk appears to be fun, it can be confusing at first. You would really need to take some time and read the little blurb it presents after signing up. And because of the variety of features, Plurk can be a lot of work especially when you just want to play. Finding your friends is a challenge as well. The search engine only allows you to use other social networking and email sites to invite friends. One other downside is when you receive messages; they do not necessarily mean they are messages for you. The messages are simply peoples’ responses to you and your friends’ plurks.

Conclusion: Even though there are few kinks, and people are even negatively commenting about it on Twitter, Plurk takes micro-blogging to the next level. The amount of tools that it offers provides an open door for more social interacting, especially with sharing videos and photos.