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.

In the latter days of the Web 2.0 the new trend is to make new web sites invite only, for what’s called a private beta. Like many out there i fancy a invite only thing, it makes me feel special and unique.

So when i read about invites to a new thing called Blippr i didn’t think twice, and believe me, I’ve received invites to services that I’ll never use. It was in that mind set that I’ve arrived at blippr website, knowing absolutely nothing about it.

After the registration, i start tinkering with it, trying to understand what the site was all about, and I was in for a surprise.

A good surprise at that, Blippr takes the 160 characters rule that exist in Twitter and Jaiku to a new height, by limiting most interactions to that amount of text. At it’s heart it’s a social network devoted to comments on movies, books, music and more.

It takes a bit of Wikipedia, by allowing the user to create a new blip for a movie that isn’t already listed on the website. It then searches for information on the web about the movie title you’ve just entered filling in automatically most information about the movie. I’m referring to movies, but the same can be done for books, music, etc.

It also takes a bit of inspiration on Digg, by allowing the user not only to comment on your blip, but to agree or disagree with it, much in the way of a thumbs up, thumbs down thing.

The site is slick and clean, the potential is huge, the approach is simple. I think we have a winner here. I’ll be using blippr from now on, if you care to get in touch just visit my profile at http://www.blippr.com/profiles/438.

As i said in the beginning Blippr is still in private beta, but you can ask for an invitation at their website, and you’ll probably get one in a couple of hours, so go ahead and try for yourself.

Since yesterday hi5 has been experiencing all kinds of problems, that peaked late last night with a total failure to respond.

Most of the times it just displays a sign acknowledging the problem but stating that they are improving their services. Could this be the a tighter integration to Google’s OpenSocial?

With 70 million users hi5 has been raising some money to expand and gain leverage in Asia. Despite being San Francisco based, Hi5 doesn’t figure in the top 10 major Social Networks in the US, which may explain why this downtime hasn’t been reported in any major US news feed.

I’m not a big Social Network user, but I do have an account in hi5, and I was unable to login yesterday. This morning I’m able to login but I’m experiencing weird behavior, like all links pointing to non existing pages and other oddities.

Maybe it’s time to check out Bebo or some other network.

Update: I was able to get a screenshot of hi5’s error message.