I confess: I like Plurk. I like the timeline. I like the serenity of the GUI. I'm not sure how it would work with a lot of messages, but let's face it, Twitter's river of tweets can seem like a laundry list of random thoughts.

But there are two things that make Twitter better, despite its persistent performance problems and downtimes:

1 - Twitter has apps. I joined Twitter early last year, but I don't think I would be Twittering at all anymore if I didn't have Twitterific or something similar. I don't like to have to live on a website for high-traffic content. Now if Plurk had a nice desktop app -- preferably not requiring the clunky Adobe Air....

2 - Twitter is where the people are. Plurk has a nice GUI, but will people come? I've discovered some new people, but I don't know many people on Plurk. Cool GUIs don't quite make up for the lack of "social" in a social network app.

Still, I think Plurk is onto something. It's distinct. There are several web apps that could be called "Twitter alternatives" but they're pretty much the same, or very similar.