Plurk, you may say, is yet another twitter clone. I like to say it’s twitter with added motion sickness, because one of the main features is this visualisation mode where you scroll messages horizontally on a timeline (btw, if you’re interested in this kind of visualization effect, have a look at the great SIMILE project).

The other added feature is Karma (of Slashdot‘s fame), that is used to turn user’s experience in a sort of game. Higher karma means more colorful messages for you and added motion sickness fun for your readers.
All in all, a quite clever strategy to get people in, would be nice to find out if it will be able to be sticky enough and thus if it is here to stay.

So, now that the main rush has passed, today I went and tried to subscribe. Only to discover that (unsurprisingly enough, it’s three letters and pretty open to interpretations) my nick was taken. Now that’s really no big deal: I’m not particularly attached to it and in networks where 3 letters are not enough (why why why?) I use other permutations already.
The interesting thing is, that the nice brazilian girl who claimed “bru” on plurk apparently has a lot of my Italian friends now in her roster. Which, being plurk a game, is totally cool!

However, that raises a few interesting issues:
How valuable is the claiming of digital ground?
Is the whole concept of friends/followers still valid?
What happens to physical relationship metaphors when not only space and time collapse, but identities fragmentates too? People may say “I’m a friend of bru”, and being asked “yes, bru… but where?”
And maybe even Where’s the point in claiming identities, if the whole point is just connecting to more people? Just get them all!

What’s in a name, would the Poet say…..
Again, this is totally cool in a context like Plurk, but could be annoying or even awkward in other environments to find you’ve just declared your friendship with a bunch of perfect strangers :)

Oh, btw, I’m iBru there.