Welcome to Plurk

The A-Team has been working hard these past few days to try and improve your experience of mobile Plurk. We’ve added several new features that should help make it easier for you to plurk on the go.

It is now possible to mute/unmute plurks, mark all plurks as read, and delete plurks… Straight from your mobile!
Unread plurks are now displayed in chronological order (newest first), and the input boxes no longer allow you to type more than 140 characters. Unread responses have also been fixed, and are indicated in bold.

Mute/unmute

Mark all as read

Deleting plurks

Mobile Plurk can be accessed from plurk.com/m.

New emoticon:

We here at Plurk are committed to giving rewards to our most active users. Plurkers with 100 karma can now take advantage of a new exclusive emoticon. Typing “(taser)” or “(rammi)” will result in , as shown in

Happy tasering plurking!

Last sunday (May 31st) I celebrated Plurk 1st birthday with around 300 Taiwanese plurkers. Words cannot describe what an amazing event it was and one that I will always remember for many years to come. I’ve been in Taiwan for about 4 months now and every little things about this place is heart warming to say the least. Hereby I wish to extend my gratitude to the organizer (plurker.tw.com) of this birthday event, all the sponsors and last but definitely not least, all the plurkers who were there.

Looking back, this past 1 year has been a momentous and joyful ride. As our previous blog post stated, Plurk has ALWAYS been about fun from day one. We also want to let you know how much fun we are having building this little beast and watching it grows up.  Happy birthday.

Alvin Keynote on Plurk 1st Birthday Party from Eric Chen on Vimeo.

Wow. It really feels like we just launched our vibrant community only yesterday and yet here we are now, exactly one year later, and we still can’t believe how fast and furious the ride has been and how far we’ve all come in such a short period of time. What’s that old saying again? Time flies when you’re having fun……AND Plurking! So true.

And the truth is, Plurk has ALWAYS been about fun from day one. We wanted to create a fun, social, laid back and collaborative social community unlike any other on the web–one that let people be themselves, one with genuine, positive, good-hearted people, and one which unified everyone, young and old, the world over, to share and discuss their lives with others. One year later, and the results speak for themselves: Plurk has quickly and quietly grown from what was one of the best kept secrets on the web to what is now the fastest growing social media service in Asia and one of the fastest growing websites in the world today! Clearly, it appears you all embraced Plurk the way we hoped you would, and for that we couldn’t be more grateful.

Of course, our growth this past year would be nothing were it not for the great team behind the service. Words do not even begin to describe the passion, heart, intensity, grit and hundred other adjectives for sheer hard-working tenacity that is the embodiment of all the members on the A-team. They never cease to amaze me and chances are you’ll be hearing a lot more about the humble and truly remarkable people who have made Plurk what it is today very shortly.

Here’s looking forward to another magical year ahead with all of you.

Plurk…it’s written in the stars.

Finally, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief! It’s been by far and away the most requested feature since we first launched Plurk less than a year ago. And now, thanks to many days and nights of tireless coding, we are glad to present you all with the first release of our real time conversational search engine.

What is Real Time Social Conversational Search?

Let’s backtrack a bit and discuss the search space in high level. In the taxonomy of search engines, everyone is already familiar with structure based static web search engines such as Google or Yahoo. These search engines, which have been around for about a decade, use search engine spiders which conduct link-based analysis to crawl, index, query and rank static textual data found all over the web using an algorithmic approach. And they work super well.

A search after swine flu on Plurk Real Time Search.

Over the past several years, there has also been the emergence of a new branch of more social search/news/recommendation services which mine the collective intelligence and behaviours of many to present crowdsourced results that allow users to get a more filtered or personalized view of things that may appeal to them. Think of services such as StumbleUpon or Delicious which mine the browsing/bookmarking habits of a general and more techie audience respectively, or services like Digg and Reddit which let users pull the most salient and buzzing day to day news pieces, or a social recommendation service like Last.fm which crawls and analyzes your musical-DNA to find other users who have similar tastes or helps you find other music that may appeal to you.

Fast forward now to social real-time conversation search. Social conversation search differs from existing forms of search in a couple of ways. There’s a big emphasis here on recency—that is, Plurk’s conversational search lets you get almost instantaneous feedback and reaction from real people on the issues and events shaping the world today. Want to know how people are reacting to the latest Swine Flu outbreaks? Just search for it and get in the conversation. The other benefit of social search comes from the ‘social’ part of the experience. Social search is more about human interconnectedness, subjective inquiry (asking and getting a view into more touchy/feely topics rather than questions that have hard answers) and is a more open window into the experiential lives of others than existing forms of search.

Plurk – It’s Much Bigger than you think

Of course, the biggest problem that Plurk Search attempts to tackle is the one of social discovery. It allows you to find and connect with people just like YOU by giving you a window into how BIG the Plurk community really is. While Plurk has grown steadily bigger each and every week since we first launched, the problem for users has always been that they could not easily see or benefit from this growth themselves– Since users ONLY see their own timelines 99% of the time, it has not always been easy to quickly find other like minded people or participate in real-time conversation that interest you unless a lot of your in-real-life friends were on Plurk or you were a major celebrity. Plurk Search finally solves this problem and opens up access to the vast pool of public conversations taking place over Plurk, helping make you more social, which has always been our underlying goal. Now it is easier than ever to connect with others who share your interests, passions, perspectives and feelings and see how rich the conversational experience is on Plurk all around the world.

Some Notes About Plurk’s Real Time Social Search

Plurk Search will be a rapidly evolving product here at Plurk and as we’ve mentioned, this first release is moreso an effort for us to stress test and tune search to scale to tens of millions of day to day user queries or more. Once we are comfortable with the performance of Plurk Search, we plan to quickly add more advanced features such as response indexing, on-the-fly language-to-language translations (After all, we are a global focused service aimed that aspires to make accessible all real time conversation, no matter in what language), date/timeline filtering (only retrieve matching Plurks between a certain time period), trending topics/phrases, and deeper, more accurate sentiment matching. Some other things to keep in mind:

Plurk search respects your privacy: One of the most important things Plurk Search does is ensure that the results returned are tailor matched to YOU. If you have private Plurks on your timeline, you can rest assured knowing that only you will be able to see those results in any searches conducted

Plurk search does not currently index responses: For this first release, queries are only matched against root Plurks. If you searched for ‘food’, at this time, we do not currently return results where the word ‘food’ appears in a response. Why? With this initial release, we want to ensure a stable and consistent experience which we can do so by keeping our total search index size manageable. Plurk is well on its way to reaching over 1 Billion aggregate responses, and if we were to index these at this time, it would likely put a damper on the quality of the search experience.

Sample Search Queries:

Below, we have provided some sample queries which will give you a good idea of how to make the most of our new search feature:

• YouTube videos that Plurk users love:
  http://www.plurk.com/psearch#q=youtube+loves

• Most recent plurks about the swine flu:
  http://www.plurk.com/psearch#q=swine+flu

• There are thousands of Plurker’s that celebrate their birthday each day:
  http://www.plurk.com/psearch#q=happy+birthday

Once again, we want to thank you our loyal Plurkers for having the patience to wait with us all this time while we built out our search product. We can tell you that this is just the start of a wonderful new extension to your Plurk experience. Take it out for a spin, tell us what you think, and let’s continue to work together to make Plurk even better for all the wonderful, new people that discover our little slice of heaven on the web.

Fellow Plurkers, we have some very troubling news to report to our beloved community today. Like many other prominent sites such as Google, Youtube and Wikipedia before it, Plurk has now joined the ranks of sites that have been officially banned in China.

We first discovered the ban late last week while one of our A-Team members was conducting a routine check of our web traffic logs. He was surprised to see that site wide traffic requests from China came to a standstill on the evening of April 22, 2009. After investigating and conducting some further tests, we were able to confirm that Plurk indeed had been placed behind the Great Firewall of China, restricting access to the site from all of mainland China.

This is what it looks like when China thinks we are bad people:

What is most unsettling is that up until now, we still have received no information from official Chinese sources on what prompted the ban. Was it some Plurkers talking negatively about China? Was it some internal dissidents using Plurk as a means to communicate with other like minded people? The truth is, we are not sure. However, we have been working over the last few days to get some additional information from some of our Chinese users and from official sources on why Plurk was banned and hope to restore access to our growing community of Chinese users as soon as possible.

The ban clearly is bittersweet for us here Plurk. On the one hand, it confirms a few things to us:

1. Plurk is a truly revolutionary communication platform that has the power to help people converse with each other in real time about the things that are happening around them. Clearly some of these conversations our users have been having may have upset Chinese officials but we are not entirely sure.

2. It is also an indication that Plurk has reached a sufficient critical mass of users that it is on the radar screen of someone like the Chinese Government. We are proud to have our name amongst the likes of internet giants such as Google, Youtube and Wikipedia which have also faced similar censorship in the past. As more and more people are beginning to realize, we are working on starting a social communication revolution here and the world is finally taking notice.

On the other hand, we all feel very strongly against any form of censorship. Plurk is a communication platform that is meant to liberate and democratize social communication between anyone and everyone, no matter where they are in the world. Stifling discussion and restricting free speech is never a good way to go.

We are also not sure why Plurk has been singled out here when there are many other similar services which allow the free flow dialogue of information between users, both operating inside and outside China. Why is China threatened by Plurk? We need to find this out and if you have any information on why Plurk was banned or what we can do to have China lift the ban, please contact us.

Finally, we ask Plurkers to please help spread the word about Plurk’s ban in China. Tell your friends, tell local newspapers and media websites and help China reconsider its actions. We are confident that with enough support and awareness, China will lift this ban and Plurk will again be well on its way to becoming the worlds most beloved communication platform!

Vive la Plurk!

Plurk is a great place to meet new people with similar interest or belong to the same location. Here are some tips on how you can better explore Plurkiverse and meet interesting people from around the neighborhood.

1.) our recommended plurkers page
Using our not-so-secret recipe, we have built a simple robot that recommends plurkers you might find interesting. This robot takes into consideration various factors such as your age, location and matching keywords. You can find a list of your recommended friends by going to the bottom of your ‘Find/Invite friends’ page.  There you will find a list of 9 plurkers with basic info such as picture, age and location. We compile a new list every now and then so be sure to check back often!

2.) location and keyword search
Our plurker search is another useful way to discover new people. For example, you can search by country name and it will list out all the plurkers that come from that country and you can sort the result by gender, karma or age. Here’s a list of plurkers from Taiwan. And it’s not just limited to country name - try city, state or district. You can also search by keyword such as ‘warcraft‘, ‘second life‘, ‘soccer‘ and etc. Our search page is accessible from the bottom right of your timeline or you can go directly to plurk.com/search

3.) interesting plurker page
Interesting plurker page is the place where we display some of the most interesting data about plurkiverse. The page itself is auto-customized so that it only show data that is close to your location. On this page, you will find interesting things like new plurkers, most popular plurkers, latest plurks, most interesting plurks and etc. You can also filter the timeline to show plurks that are relevant to your interest.

In late December/early January, many of you were understandably upset and had asked for explanations regarding our instability and frequent downtime during what was a rather shaky holiday season for Plurk. Admittedly, we caught the sniffles and those holiday colds are not so easy to shake off. Of course, like all our users, we hate downtime; especially since all of us here at the A-Team are Plurk zealots much like you. Hopefully this quick recap will shed some light on the problems we had related to the downtime and slow service over the prior month and give some guidance on what we’ve done to counter it.

As a summary, these were some of the issues we faced:

• We had servers scattered around our datacenter. This often made it difficult for various servers to talk to each other easily (extra overhead, multiple points of failure, etc.).
• Disk and filesystem space issues.
• MySQL replication issues, database log storage constraints.
• Server migrations and consolidations.

What have we done to rectify these problems?

• We consolidated all our servers into connected racks which lie next to each other: During the January 13 (GMT) downtime we migrated most of our previously scattered servers.
• Enabled more proactive server monitoring. We’ve tuned our notification thresholds and started to monitor a whole slew of new parameters to alert us early so we can quickly fix potential problems before they get out of hand.
• Updated MySQL; optimize our tables; monitor disk usage and purge binary logs as soon as the log space usage reaches a certain threshold.
• Make our cache servers more robust so you’re served content faster without long wait times.
• Kernel tuning to increase network performance.

We’re still continuing to work everyday on improving our infrastructure and managing our growth to keep issues to a bare minimum in the future. Of course with how passionate you guys all are, I know even a few minutes of downtime can seem like an eternity, so when we do hit snags and have prolonged outage windows, we get just as panicky as you, if not much more so.  All that said, we’ve been sailing very smoothly (knock on wood!) and look for a wonderful February with you all!

One of Plurk’s early design philosophy is to create a safe social networking environment where users can protect themselves and have full control over their own privacy setting. This is being reflected in many of our core features. On a micro level, each plurk can be customized so that only certain people can see it, should you ever wish to do so. You can also edit or delete your own plurk. On a higher level, you can also choose who can see your timeline, with 4 different options to choose from.

But sometimes we can only do so much. The gray line between verbal harassment and freedom of speech is thin enough to give us daily headaches when dealing with different situations reported by our users. The best solution seems to be to give our users enough ammo to protect themselves and at the same time, help us police plurkiverse. Here are some of the available options:

How to restrict your timeline so that it’s only viewable to your friends?
You can choose to restrict your timeline so that it is only viewable to you, or your friends, or your friends of friends. Click ‘My Account’ from the top right of your timeline, follow by ‘Privacy’. Choosing the ‘friends only’ option will also prevent people from becoming your fan.

How to hide your date of birth and location?
For extra privacy, you can choose to hide your date of birth and location from the ‘My Profile’ panel. To hide your date of birth, simply choose ‘Month’, ‘Day’, ‘Year’ for each of the drop downs.

To hide your location, un-select the check box that says ‘Show my location to others’.

How to unfollow your annoying friends without them knowing?
Another cool feature that allows you to un-follow your talkative friend’s plurk without actually removing them as friend is the ‘Timeline follow’ feature. From ‘My Friends’ panel, you can see a list of your friends and on the right side of each friend, you can see a couple of toggle buttons. Click on the Timeline Follow button to switch on or off your friend follow status. Both of you will still remain friends and he/she doesn’t even know you have stopped following their plurks . Save the awkward moment for later.

How to block bad plurker?
Sometimes when people gets really, really bad, you might have to use the ultimate weapon - block. Blocked user will not be able to see your timeline or your plurks, or request friendship or become your fan and will remain so until you unblock them. You can block a plurker from a couple of places: by hovering over a nickname in your timeline.

or by going to their profile page dashboard. Look for the block button on top right hand side.

The Appetizer

People often wonder what the secret ingredient is that makes Plurk so delicious. The answer is simple–it’s the conversations! Plurk, after all, is a social conversation community. It’s very much like any real life party or social event you attend; lots of small groups of people in a big room having many conversations about many different topics. Invite your friends, have a little wine and cheese, and you can choose to participate actively in any discussion, start your own discussion, listen in to other discussions without saying a word, or move on to other conversations happening around you. The choice really is yours.

The Main Dish - US Elections 2008 Timeline

One of those yummy topics which we see a lot of people discussing lately on Plurk is the upcoming US Presidential Elections, being held on November 4, 2008. Everybody is talking about Obama and McCain and the conversations often get heated and intense, but that’s what makes Plurk so enjoyable! Check out some recent examples:

Why do techies love Obama, Why? (Over 80 replies!)

Elisabeth Hasselbeck has a tainted soul because she thinks Obama is a terrorist (Over 250 replies!)

So many great conversations happening on Plurk about the US Elections, but unfortunately, up until now, it was hard to access those conversations taking place outside your own circle of Plurk friends. Well, not any longer! We just rolled out our first topically themed timeline centered entirely around all the US elections over at www.plurk.com/vote

The US Elections timeline aggregates ALL messages from across Plurk that contain special US Election related keywords like “Obama” or “Mccain”. Plurks highlighted in blue are about Obama/Biden, Plurks highlighted in red are about McCain/Palin and Plurks that are white are deemed to be neutral. The page is updated in real time so you can see the pulse of the conversation from all across the Plurkisphere that is taking place.

The Dessert - Plurk the Vote, Win $5,000!

While a lot of people come for the appetizers and many people will be enjoying the main dish, everyone really cares about the dessert! And boy did we bake together a wonderfully sweet dessert to accompany our US Elections timeline. The idea behind Plurk the Vote is super simple:

1. Every user on Plurk is given their own Mock Election page at www.plurk.com/vote/username (where ‘username’ is your Plurk username)
2. You tell fellow Plurkers, friends, and family to vote in your Mock Election by sending them your link.
3. If you hold one of the biggest Mock elections on Plurk (based on total number of votes by the November 4th, 2008 deadline), you win your share of $5,000USD in cold hard cash!

We are also giving away 30 $25 Amazon.com gift certificates over the course of the next 30 days to ONE voter each day who has voted in a mock election. More details of the contest and prizes are available here.

So how do you improve your chances of winning Plurk the Vote?

The best way to win is to invite people not already on Plurk!

Here are some suggestions:

1. Invite your Friends by sharing your vote link and telling them to vote in your Mock Election
2. Add a Plurk the Vote Widget to your blog or personal site
3. Write a blog post about the campaign and tell people to vote on your Mock Election
4. Get in touch with Political blogs and tell them to support your Plurk the Vote campaign
5. Find other places/sites where lots of people are discussing the US Elections and poll them on how they will be voting by passing your Mock Election link.

This promises to be the most exciting contest we’ve run to date on Plurk and we’re really looking forward to seeing who will hold the biggest elections and end up taking home the cash! Now go on, Plurk the Vote, tell us who you support, and good luck. You’ve got 30 days before the contest ends!

Phew! We were so overwhelmed by the volume and quality of submissions that we received for our first Plurk Design Off contest that we really have to hand it to the community for their creativity and their unbridled passion for all things Plurk! You definitely did not disappoint us. That said, the toughest part was picking the winners from all the entries that came through, but after much deliberation and review, we came up with the 20 Plurkers who each have won themselves a $50 Amazon.com Gift Certificate for their hard work and effort in making this first contest a success!

Here are the Plurk usernames of the list of winners in no particular order:

pinkelephant
thoughtwrong
tonle
aliyahplz
justinlitalien
niwat0ri
ova
anakcerdas
FWood
paysonjewelry
MoMZ
SwordMama
sebastiandavies
squirehogg
kdfrawg
cainanunes
shoichi
samproof
ncus
jaiin

And here are just some of the fabulous entries we received from the winners in our first ever contest:

A funny animated Plurk video

Congrats again to the winners and great job to all the other entrants. We sincerely appreciate all your efforts. We’ll be contacting winners shortly to ensure they all get their $50 Amazon.com gift certificate. And if you didn’t get a chance to get in an entry into this first contest, stay tuned for more great contests coming from Plurk in the near future!