Lately I've been sucked into the vortex of a new social networking site. I've been on Facebook for ages now and the novelty has work off, and I use it mainly to browse other people's photos now it seems. Twitter was OK but I ended up only checking once a day and at time only once every couple of days. Then I joined Plurk and the experience was very very different.
After thinking about it for a while I think I know why I like it so much - it reminds me of the old newsgroups I hung out on in the 90s. Posts were laid out in a linear fashion (although scrolling down as opposed to across) and you were able to follow threads really easily. Twitter is so cluttered and I often lost interesting stuff in a sea of chatter I wasn't interested in but Plurks 'mute' function helps clear that up enormously. Time is an important thing to me as I often only have a matter of seconds to pop up the screen, look at a site and then go again and Plurk is ideal for that.
The other thing that has changed too is that I now have people to chat to on this site. In the past I've not had that online friend group before and the social networking site I had belonged to for about 6 years up until this year had a very specific focus. Those people were not people I'd like to hang out with much in real life so that kind of stunted the social aspect a bit. That's not to say I didn't have friends within that site but they were few and far between. On Plurk I have a range of people to chat to with a similarly wide range of interests and even different time zones too.
I have the widget on my blog but I don't think anyone is clicking through to Plurk from here yet. I gte so much craft traffic to this site that I don't think my usual viewer is interested in what Plurk appears to offer but I'll keep watching my stats and see what happens with that. I have my blog link on my Plurk profile and haven't seen much traffic from Plurk back to here either but I have a feeling the people that I know on Plurk visit my blog from other sites.
As for the future of Plurk? I think the novelty will wear off eventually for me. My posting will go down a bit as the months pass but I don't think I will drop out completely. Because I am at home with the kids all day my surfing time is restricted to tiny bites and often I have a craft project that fills up all my 'non parenting' time during the day, so there will be natural lulls in my time on the site. But I can see myself staying up to date with everything and not abandoning it like I have with so many other sites in the past.