The shine, glitter and buzz on Plurk may have faded, but there is a community there who remains, and apparently they're pretty into ... knitting. These are the updates from the Plurk community as brought to us yesterday by Duncan Riley over at the Inquisitr. He proclaims that the community, while it is no serious threat to the dominant Twitter, is alive and well, and folks are sticking around.
While that may be anecdotally true, there are some numbers in the mix that indicate otherwise. More and more recently, I've been turning to the analytics engines to verify the generalized beliefs that are being propogated across the blogosphere. In this case, Duncan is technically correct (the best kind of correct!), but a deeper look at the numbers tell a slightly different story.
1) Plurk definitely benefited from the blogosphere bump. Given that microblogging is very popular amongst the blogger set, the fact that Twitter experienced a whole host of downtime issues in June combined with the advertised availability (and falsely advertised uptime stability) of Plurk spelled one thing: guaranteed new users for the almost unheard of Plurk.
2) Plurk is very definitely trending downwards. Granted both of these stats are analyzed from the Alexa graph, the least reliable of any of the analytics engines, but the graphs here agree with Google Trends, which while aren't nearly as detailed, show a very close resemblence. Compete would show a similar picture, but for the fact that their traffic numbers are averaged by the month (which is the graph that Duncan used for his illustration).
