The new kid on the SMS sized blogging town is Plurk. It uses the tested and true recipe for web 2.0 success these days, tons of AJAX everywhere with a pastel color scheme and several messaging interfaces.

But one thing is sure, Plurk isn’t Twitter or Jaiku. Plurk is quite different in fact. What has struck most people is the beheaded dog logo. Which isn’t a logo at all, but only a status ranking badge.

Every plurk user has a karma rating, which is based on your activity and popularity on the site. The background logo is associated to the Karma state in which the user is. There are several ranks based on karma, only the lowest state, called the "state of creation" will display the headless dog.

Here are two pictures of other Karma states:

As of the time of this writing some Plurk functions are down due to the mass influx of people which was specially accelerated by Twitter being down again.

Another striking difference between Plurk and it’s competitors is it’s timeline. Instead of a good old vertical timeline we see a chronological side oriented timeline. I have some reserves on how will this work when users like Robert Scoble joins Plurk and starts adding everyone under the sky.

Plurk also relies on a action based action messaging. It reminds me of /me command in IRC or Twitstori. As I said a couple of days ago, the market is ready to see a new killer webapp on the social messaging/microblogging country.

Google and Twitter joined forces to create a geographical based mashup using certain keywords related to Super Tuesday voting.
The app itself is nothing new or fancy, it just used the location field from the twitter user that happens to make some comment about politics and places it on Google Map on the appropriate spot in the world.

Twittervision has the same functionality for twitter’s public timeline and is a popular twitter app for quite some time now.
Politweets has been around for a while and deals exclusively with political chatter on twitter.

What strikes me as odd is why hasn’t Google used it’s recent acquisition Jaiku for this? It definitely would be a small push to revive the dying microblogging platform.

Jaiku users are fleeing in droves to Twitter, mostly due to the lack of activity but some are just seeing their hopes in Google turning Jaiku into a viable Twitter competitor fading to dust.

Is this the final nail in Jaiku’s coffin? Leave your comments