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.

RSS feeds are the butter of the web 2.0 bread. The rss feed market is by nature a subset of the web but it’s getting bigger each day by the development of new ways to distribute content and media directly to the consumers.

I think it’s safe to say that half of the blogs and podcasts in existence today are consumed entirely via a RSS agreggator. And it’s now common for institutional websites to have some kind of blog too.

The initial wave of RSS clients was based on desktop apps. It took a couple of years for the next logical step, which was web based RSS aggregators.
For the latter part of the last decade our lifestyles have been changing to adapt to the mobile world. And web based rss aggregators fit perfectly in this new reality.
Bloglines was a major player in this revolutionary market until Google deployed it’s all mighty Google Reader and set web based rss reading as the new standard.

Apparently everybody forgot all about desktop based rss readers. At least until now when out of the blue Newsgator reminds us that desktop RSS readers are still alive, by releasing most of their product line for free.

This seems a desperate attempt at desperate times. And i really doubt that this move will dictate the return of desktop readers.

By the way do you still use a desktop based RSS reader? Why?

I must confess I had very low expectations when I read this blog post shared by Robert Scoble about a new web app called Photophlow.

According to their website “photophlow is an easy and fun way to talk about and share flickr photos in real time.
Think of it as the ultimate flickr communicator: invite your friends, search photos together, chat and comment all at once.” which immediately got me thinking about some meebo + flickr mashup.

After signing up to the beta, I got my invitation fairly quickly. The site is brilliantly designed in a simple and intuitive way.

It’s indeed a chat app, but it’s interwined with flickr in many ways. Letting the user share not only his pictures with others, but search for topics being discussed to illustrate a point or simply add something new to talk about.

Flickr Group moderators will go ape with Photophlow. By casually grouping together in real time a bunch of people that share the same common artistic and photo interests.

Several features of Photophlow reveal great attention to detail. Chat users are used to demonstrate actions by using commands like /clap /smiles. These commands are not only readily available but can be linked to any photo on flickr. So if you want your smile to show a picture of a grinning dog or a sad clown, it’s just up to you.

While I was testing out Photophlow I got to talk a bit to Neil Berkman one of the developers behind this project. He took the time to give me the full guided tour and answer some questions. Thanks Neil.

I’m not internet guru, or startup analyst but Photophlow will hit Flickr like a storm.