Plurk is a new micro-blogging service that looks a lot like a Twitter clone. At face value Plurk allows you to post updates letting people know what you're up to. You know, telling everyone you're brushing your cat, or feeding your hair, or trying to break the world beer drinking record whilst standing on your head.

The normal stuff.

There might be more that meets the eye to this little service though.

Right off the bat, here are some features that make Plurk stand out:

• No character restrictions
• More elegant display of your "timeline", with Ajax drag and drop capability
• Pre-set emoticons and prefixes such as "was, is, will"

Pretty basic stuff, right?

Well here are the two potential game changers:

• Karma Points
• Cliques

What are Karma points? Basically it's a measure of how active you and your Plurk friends are on the site. The more Plurk services you use (such as instant messaging or uploading a profile picture) the more points you'll rack up.

And what are cliques? Well you know the answer to that. It's the ability to group your friends together into categories that you choose. Pownce lets you do this already, and so does Facebook...but the possibilities are endless with this one. Think of being able to send updates to very unique groups of people. Family, friends, possible investors or colleagues. You could spend an infinite amount of time shuffling your cliques based on what's happening around you. Has someone fallen off the map or lost favor with you? Then they're out of the clique. It's sticky AND useful.

Twitter's downtime and focus on marketing over substance has maddened a lot of people. Who will be there to clean up the mess? Don't shirk, it might be Plurk. On the other hand, Plurk may have to deal with the same scaling and reliability issues as Twitter. The service was down for a brief period this morning. What do you think? Are you ready to leave Twitter for a service that offers more features? Or would you rather stick to a network that already has a loyal userbase?

UPDATE: There is indeed a 140 character limit.