Indonesia loves social media. We recently reported about Bouncity’s impressive numbers out of the gate, as quite a few early adopters flocked to see what it was about. But lately I was surprised to find that Plurk has also gained some traction in the country thanks to Indonesia’s love for all things social.
Plurk is similar to Twitter in its basic functionality, except that each initial comment is given a thread of responses, making it more conversational in style. Plurk asks users to select qualifiers such as loves, likes, is, hates, etc for each message. This means every message you write is in third person. Like Pownce, Plurk lets you embed Flickr images and YouTube videos… Additionally, Plurk differs from Twitter in its user interface. Plurk shows your friends’ updates in a horizontally scrolling timeline.
To learn more about how the service is doing these days, we got in touch with Alvin Woon, the co-Founder of Plurk.
1. When did you found Plurk? How many people are in your team right now?
We have about 11 employees right now (plurk.com/plurkteam). Plurk was founded in November 2007 and we launched around June 1st 2008. We were just trying to launch a social network with a focus on short messaging, but unlike twitter or any other networks at that time, it would have threaded comments, game elements. and emoticons. 🙂
2. Twitter has promoted tweets and promoted trending topics as a source of revenue. Have you found a way to be profitable yet?
We are still pre-revenue but rest assured a pretty innovative method of monetization will materialize over the next couple of months.
3. Plurk seems to be focusing on Asia or even South East Asia. Why?
We are not focusing on any specific part of the world per se. It just so happens that we have more users here, so we care a lot about the feedback that we get from them.
4. Can you give us some numbers for Plurk in Indonesia?
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