When Twitter suffered from the infamous outages dubbed promptly as the "fail whale" due to the error graphic, some users began turning to alternatives. I switched to Plurk, but not without deleting my first Twitter account. Of late, some would have realized I am now back on Twitter listening to micro-conversations and scouting for key words.
I am not particularly an early adopter. I would be at best, what some know as, a settler. And much of my reasons for not crashing into any tools at first notice can be found in both Twitter and Plurk. Some early adopters often exaggerate the soundness of a new tool. As life will tell you, realistic performance is quite another matter.
Plurk is now testing the patience of its many users. Since the later half of 2008, it has given its users more and more downtime. Considering the withdrawal symptoms of those who use Plurk heavily (like myself), we would have thought Plurk would undertake some serious fixing. While Plurk's downtime is still a frowning factor, we actually see more bugs and error messages.
Fair enough, the Plurk team DID post in their timeline that the team is always working on something once in a blue moon. Posting these aside, the user experiences have been atrocious, I must say.
I always find Plurk's users a lot more connected than Twitter's. Conversations flow a lot more than what you would find in Twitter. This is so because Plurk is more topic-centric while Twitter is more user-centric. With other integration tools springing up, topics in Twitter are often brought off its channel and discussed elsewhere. In this aspect, Plurk is better off in terms of sustaining conversations within its compounds. You must admit, Twitter is not exactly conversation-friendly.
That said, it only means Plurk needs to harness on its advantage - conversations! But, users are getting unhappy with these frequent downtimes and bugs. These are the downsides that are proving to be obstacles to conversations. How would you like it if you're in the mist of a discussion or chat, everything just went out abruptly?
The unhappiness of Plurk users doesn't reside in just the downtime alone. It is the recurrence of the same problems that is obstructing all of us. Users are asking that your problems be fixed once and for all, while they understand that there will always be new bugs along the way. When you have old bugs left unfixed coupled with increasing new bugs, that is certainly asking for a good tongue-lashing.
Much like Twitter, the predecessor still sees outages especially during the US elections. Now, Twitter seems to be back in business. Plurk isn't.
Plurk need to also recognize the spiraling factors beyond the media & technical aspects - user experiences! How does Plurk's users feel about these frequent outages and bugs? Do they enjoy logging into Plurk first thing in the morning and realize they have new obstacles to overcome?
We need whales no more...
