When youth Twitter, they Plurk

When teens Twitter they do it on Plurk - a new site that rewards your increasing sociability with Karma credits and emoticons to visualise your feelings. I've joined, and its addictive. I can definitely see how teens would fall for this Facebook style microblog... but i wonder if it would really ever replace/match the status in Facebook? Thanks to FutureLab for this post.

Plurk, Twitter for Teens?

by: Karl Long

Just heard of this new service called Plurk which is a similar “microblogging” service rather like Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku etc. According to Venture Beat it launched in January this year and seems to be targeting a more teenage demographic.

bub.blicio.us asks the question “is Plurk another Twitter?” and in many ways it is, it’s a lifestreaming/microblogging platform with friends and fans etc. The one major difference that I see in Plurk is it’s “Karma” measure, and that is one of the only reasons why I think it will be interesting to watch what happens. Karma is essentially a measure of your level of participation in the Plurk system, and it’s the kind of explicit feedback that I think can fuel the growth of social systems. One of the reasons that Yelp is so successful is it has multiple feedback mechanisms that reward and recognize the right activity in the social network, and therefore encourages more of that activity. If you reward the right “value creating” activities on your social network you set up very powerful virtuous cycles.

Mind you, as bub.blicio.us also pointed out there is no apparent business model or revenue model, agreed, but what else is new.

Original Post: http://experiencecurve.com/archives/plurk-twitter-for-teens