Ryan A Graves.com

In the midst of Twitter’s ever so obvious struggles it was only a matter of time before competition entered the market. With the growth that Twitter has experienced (doubling in March/April 08) it was obvious that there were going to be copy cats.

Plurk is the only site that I’ve seen that is getting ‘tons’ of hype on the internet (outside of Pownce). So much so that Loic Lemeur, Kevin Rose and other big names are going there early just to reserve their name in case Plurk blows up. Scoble tried to get Scobleizer and somebody snaked it! Damn user name squatters. Loic Lemeur even suggested a business that gets your user name on all the new start-ups for you. Luckily I got ‘ryangraves‘.

Plurk has the really simple and intuitive design of a timeline actually laid out horizontally, unlike Twitters thread style. Another cool thing they have built in is what they call  ‘Karma’. A user develops Karma by using Plurk more and more and I think by adding friends. As Twitter continues to struggle with there infrastructure people will undoubtedly try new tools. Plurk just might be the one they go to. So far it doesn’t look like Plurk integrates with Twitter but that might be a way for the Plurk folks to make the transition even more enticing.