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A few minutes ago I sat down at my computer, opened my browser, loaded Plurk, and planned to write a short update about how I wasn’t feeling particularly cheery at that moment. But then I paused. “Wait a minute, Andy,” I thought, “is this the place to be getting personal? Is Plurk the vehicle to be getting detailed about why I haven’t had a great evening?” I shook my head, decided against it, and posted to Pownce instead.
As I thought about why I had decided to post to Pownce instead of Plurk, it slowly dawned on me: There isn’t yet a precedent of being honest, personal, or emotional on Plurk. In the few days the service has been available to mainstream users, I had a hunch there had been few posts on an emotional or personal level. Was this the case? Since Plurk allows users to filter by a set of verbs, I selected the most emotional ones (”wishes,” “loves,” and “feels”) and looked through the timeline for updates containing these words.
As I suspected, extremely few updates took advantage of these verbs. As I scanned through the public timeline, I noticed a bunch of trivial updates: one Plurker sharing the movie he was watching, another linking her latest blog post, a third rejoicing over a newly-acquired dancing banana. Rarely was there an honest-to-goodness post about a bad day at work, falling in love with a classmate, or sharing a fantastic day with the kids. As a result, I felt uncomfortable adding my own more personal thoughts and feelings in the Plurk timeline.
At first I considered whether or not this was a problem. True, web services adapt to fill certain roles, and maybe there’s a deep-seated need within the internet community for a (more reliable) platform for sharing these trivial updates. The thing is, though, Plurk is a social network, which means it can only be as strong as the relationships between its users, and the unfortunate truth is that emotional and personal updates help found and strengthen these relationships. Without a precedent for honest disclosure, I worry about the service’s staying power.
Plurk has a lot going for it. It’s reliable, fun, and different in a good way, but similar in a way we’d expect, too. However, these advantages bring with them a set of cons, as well: the whimsical look and feel of the site, short-form nature of the updates, and emphasis on quantity over quality (viz. the Karma system) detract from the requisite humanness of social networking websites.
My gut feeling: Right now, Plurk is the one-night stand of the social networking world. In order for it to be any more, it’s got to help me feel more connected to other human beings. And it’s not.
What do you think? Does Plurk seem a little too impersonal and sterile for your liking, too? Or am I making mountains out of molehills? And another thought: Why has Twitter never seemed so impersonal? Back me up or call me out by leaving a comment. You’ll help test out my new Disqus implementation while you’re at it!
(Need to know more about Plurk? Start by checking out these resources, or jump in headfirst by joining up today!)
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I found this link from another post I read (Dosh Dosh) about Twitter relationships. I agree with you to some degree, yet have to disagree only because I don’t think that you get into the issue quite deep enough. I agree that Twitter and Plurk are somewhat impersonal, however for me it is in the mere fact that no one will really care to follow you unless you know the person. I have been a member for some time (ecrunner) and have yet to get followers that are not my personal friends or co-workers. That being said, it is irrelevant to anyone to share my feelings and emotions to strangers, as it will probably scare them away from following me. (…. thought: I will experiment and share nothing but feelings the rest of the week. See who follows me then). Where I begin to disagree, and I commented on the other blog, is that twitter is not the foundational place to make relationships. There are many different social sites on the internet and each one is intertwined with one another. In order for you to make lasting relationships on twitter, you have to have that same interaction on Digg, Stumble, etc…. However, you have to keep in mind that each of these sites will result in different types of relationships. Check out my take on it: http://tinyurl.com/5m3ecs I do think there are many common thoughts on social networking, though.
Thanks for commenting, Erin! That would make for an interesting experience: trying to be more personal than usual on all of your favorite networks to see what happens. I don’t know, to be honest! Let me know if you do decide to follow through with it.
That’s interesting to me that you know all of your Twitter friends in person. Do you happen to live in a particularly tech-savvy place? I find that as an early adopter I can only convince maybe 2-5% of people I know in real life to join me on services like Twitter, so if I didn’t try to follow new people, I’d be extremely lonely on the service (and, thus, wouldn’t have much reason to use it).
I think you might be in the minority if you only friend people you do know. I wrote another post on ‘friending’ unknowns, etc. on networking sites and got a number of great thoughts on why one might want to expand their horizons (take a look here: http://www.andydesoto.com/social-media/why-foll...).
I guess my question is this: what is the foundational place to make relationships, as you describe, online? Ignoring for a moment your real-life contacts that join you on a social networking service, how can you forge lasting relationships on the internet? If not through a short-form site like Twitter or Plurk, then what?
You’ve inspired me to think about these questions in a little more detail, and I’ll have to get into a bit more depth, as you suggest, in a future post.
Thanks for taking the time to visit and comment!
Very interesting topic i must say. I use Twitter for all that usual, ‘I’m in depressing mood’ kinda stuff. Usually no one replies or anything, but its good to just let it out sometimes.