My colleague at VentureBeat, David Adewuni, wrote up a new micro-messaging service called Plurk about a month ago. Seeing as he described it as “Twitter meets FriendFeed”, I had to check it out. I did but found one major problem: no one was using it.

For whatever reason, maybe due to the fact that Twitter is down again for database maintenance, that seems to have changed today. I’m now getting friend requests and finding people I know.

I’ll say one thing about Plurk, it’s pretty. Some people won’t like the non-standard timeline look, preferring the stream-like Twitter approach, but I like this change of pace. I also really like how it handles embedded pictures and videos. I think future versions of Twitter, which I hope one day will include the option to embed pictures and videos, could learn a lot from this.

Will Plurk catch on? Probably not, but who knows – maybe if Twitter stays down long enough. But just being pretty isn’t enough, just check out MoodMill as an example of that.

You can find me on Plurk here.

[UPDATE]: According to Christian Anderson, Leo Laporte and Veronica Belmont are to blame for the influx of people when both tweeted about it this morning.