So I figured I'd take advantage of Plurk's Twitter import feature; worked great, found a bunch of people I already follow on Twitter (61 to be exact). Except I'm not allowed to import them all, only 50 of them. Because the timeline would be too crowded. Sacrificing user experience to preserve a design aesthetic is "worst mistake you can ever make as a web developer" #1. - Mark Trapp
Had the same issue Mark. Just ran it twice. Got them all in. - Robert Sanzalone
So Scoble would have to run that import, um... 400 times or so if all his contacts were to switch to Plurk? Yes, fail. - Cyndy
plus you have to select them one by one, a bit too much clicking - Dobromir Hadzhiev
They've said it many times Plurk is not designed to be like Twitter. They've designed it to communicate with your close friends, everyone else you should become their fan. They constanly discourage adding hundreds and hundreds of friends and your "karma" is not rewarded for it. I got clarification on this the other day. It's part of the system design to use it this way. Right? Wrong? Who knows, but that's how it is. - Bwana McCall
Sure Bwana, but providing tools like this only serve to confuse that message. Providing an importer from Twitter says "We want you to use us instead of Twitter, look how easy it is to migrate over!" only to tell the user "whoa, not so fast, only 50 people! We know best for you!" and, to top it all off, it's not even enforced; as Robert points out, if I go back do the import over, I can add another 50 from my list, which seems to fly in the face of why they're saying there's a 50 person limit. - Mark Trapp
Good software solves a need. Great software solves a need and backs the hell off. Let me use Plurk the way I want, don't tell me what's best for me. I know what's best for me. You gave me a tool to import my Twitter contacts? Awesome, let me import all of them. Not 50. Not 50 at a time. All of them. - Mark Trapp
If it were enforced, then I'd see your point, but it's not. It's a way of saying, you'll be sorry if you do this. Look at the flip side, what if they allowed you to do it and your timeline becomes severely cluttered? I'm 80% sure some would complain that "you should have warned us about this". I seriously doubt they are taking the attitude "we know what's best for you", it's more of a "if you do this action, here are the consequences..here's a slight hinderance to bring the point home". - Bwana McCall
Bottom line is, this feature was put there because of Twitter's problems, but now this limitation is there to preserve the intended experience. Some would say they are stupid for not capitalizing on Twitter's woes, which is what they're doing. Some would say, don't put the feature there if you don't want it used like Twitter, which is what you're saying. It's a compromise on their part which I don't think will make or break the service. - Bwana McCall
Except there's no option to say "I got it, now let me do it anyway." You just get the error message. The only way to add more people is to more or less randomly try to import again, where it happily lets you import another 50. No warning there saying "Hey, you already have more than 50 people on your list, you shouldn't enter any more." No, the way this is handled only serves to confuse and infuriate people. - Mark Trapp
Twitter wasn't designed to be used like it's being used either. I don't like Plurk, personally, but find it hilarious to say "You don't WANT more than 50 users imported. It will TOTALLY wreck our design!" Is it an app or is it performance art? - Cyndy
People don't have time to figure out what the developer's intentions are. If they can't use a website in an expected manner, they leave. Providing this feature in the way in which it was provided tells people "we don't want you here." Sure, they are never going to be Twitter, but doing things like this (and the big disclaimer telling everyone to only add your very closest friends) means they will never catch on, even by themselves. - Mark Trapp
Twitter's simplicity allows for flexibility. Plurk's timeline does not. It's a warning, nothing more, nothing less. If it bothers you that much, there's plenty more in there that I'm sure will deter you from using it. - Bwana McCall
Bwana, it's not a warning. If there was a banner at the top of the import saying "We strongly discourage adding more than 50 people" before adding people, that'd be a warning. It outright refuses to add more than 50 people, and provides no recourse. Only people who thought "what the hey, let me try it again" were able to do it again, again with no warning. This is stupid how they implemented this. - Mark Trapp
Mark, I don't think this UI defect is enough to make or break the system. There are way too many other factors to consider. Many other services don't even offer a Twitter import, let alone hooks into Twitter's service. If I were writing this defect as a tester, I would mark as a medium priority only because it's a barrier to entry. It's a low priority since it' a generally a one time function. - Bwana McCall
Bwana, I realize now that my screenshot is a bit misleading. The banner at the top of it only shows up AFTER you try to import more than 50 people. It's not there before. - Mark Trapp
Ok Mark, you've made your point that it's stupid to implement it this way. So are you going to submit it as feedback to Plurk? :) - Bwana McCall
Bwana, the apparent impetus for a feature like this, based on the available information, is to preserve the design aesthetic of the site. "It'd be too crowded!" There are a few things you can sacrifice usability for: technical limitations and functional requirements are two of them. But to sacrifice it for your design is insane. They either need to figure out how to handle more than 50 people, or make a cogent case for why more than 50 people is unnecessary. - Mark Trapp
Bwana, that brings up a whole other issue I have with Plurk. Where are the developers? - Mark Trapp
I used the faceless contact form pointing to the discussion, as well. I guess there's no @reply notification or direct messaging feature in Plurk, too? - Mark Trapp
yes there is a direct message feature, (called a private plurk) however, you must be friends with the individual from what I recall. - Bwana McCall
Nice, if I click on your link, then click "My Profile," it brings me to your profile. - Mark Trapp
I can only add so many new things to my "brain feed-stream". Unfortunately, I deem Plurk a FAIL. Just too juvenile a feel. I need no more MySpace clones. - Mathew A. Koeneker
Hi guys. I am a developer of Plurk and I want to share some input on this. The major factor for this limit is performance - fetching and inserting timelines from hundreds/thousands of users isn't cheap and would be very costly. The second major factor is that following a lot of people on Plurk will have penalties as we don't have all the timeline filters developed. But we do listen to user feedback and we have raised the limit to 100.
This limit may be removed in the near future, depends on performance and the power of filtering. - Amir Salihefendic
Sigh. Now you know why I love FriendFeed so much. No limits. Always fast. I reload the page hundreds of times a day. - Robert Scoble
Oh, and I already have more than 800 friends on Plurk (compared to more than 12,000 followers on FriendFeed and 26,000+ on Twitter) and I only manually added a handful. - Robert Scoble
Robert, FriendFeed does have limits. Both you and I ran into one of them. There was a comment limit which caused commenting to fail after a certain point. FriendFeed raised the limit once we brought it to their attention. Come on now, FriendFeed isn't THAT perfect. - Bwana McCall
Bwana: that limit didn't hurt and was, like you said, instantly raised. I haven't hit it since despite thousands of comments. - Robert Scoble
plurk needs an api stat, i doubt people want to use it as there sole twitter like interface - Chris Jones
Plurk, Jaiku, Pownce, Twitter all these services have SIMILAR goals. Again this reinforces to me that microblogging is becoming the "new email" (aka killer app). Email, IM, microblogging three great ways to communicate. Perhaps FriendFeed will be the savior for all of them. But FF would have to also be able to post freely to them as well. So, FF becomes something like a service and you use apps like Twhirl, etc to interact with your stream. - Tris Hussey
The best way to use Plurk is head over to the mobile interface at http://www.plurk.com/m - Personally, I hate the regular UI...its like playing Defender. - Delete Me
Leave it up to Robert to jinx FriendFeed :) It's been pretty slow today and I'm getting sporadic Service Unavailable errors. No system is perfect :) - Bwana McCall
Or maybe because the UI is annoying as hell... - Eric Florenzano
My guess why it wont catch on....Because we don't need it. - Gadiel Rivera
I submit Plurk's not disruptive enough. Twitter's *different*. FriendFeed, too. Plurk...not so much. - Brent Newhall
That limitation can be fixed, fixing Twitter's downtime problem is another story as we all know. - Bob Ngu
