Plurk: New Twitter clone may be better than Twitter

There’s a new Twitter clone on the block. Plurk is much more visual than Twitter, which I like. It’s colorful (and customizable), quirky and, best of all, uses timelines. It also allows you to follow people without adding them as friends, lets you divide your friends into groups (or “cliques” in Plurk-speak). It also groups conversations, which is nice.

It picks up on some Twitter features — comments are limited to 140 characters. Adding the “@” symbol before a username links to that user. You can send updates to specific groups or people, or to everybody. Links to photos and videos show up visually. You can add comments from the Web site, but Plurk does not have an open API, so no third-party apps yet. In six weeks, they say you’ll be able to send updates via text message.

It’s new, and there are definitely some bugs: Finding Plurkers from other services has been down for the last 12 hours, and adding friends is a bit confusing the first time through. The ability to fold other services into Plurk, like Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed or BrightKite or RSS feeds doesn’t exist. And it needs a good search feature.

Check it out, and let me know what you think.