Welcome to Plurk

As you may or may not have noticed, the official Plurk blog has been awfully quiet over the past couple of weeks but don’t let that fool you. We’ve been busy as ever quietly rolling out feature after feature and usability tweaks here and there to make the overall Plurking experience that much more enjoyable. If you’ve kept a keen eye, you’ll have noticed some of these new goodies but here’s a quick recap of if you’ve missed them:

• No Karma Required For Timeline Customizations - You can completely customize and theme your profile with CSS now without needing any karma! Some users may remember we had restricted custom CSS profile theming to those users over karma 25 when we first launched this feature. Not any longer. Now even new users have the ability to get in there and showcase their personality through their profile.

• Plurk Badges on your Dashboard - Many of our users started noticing new badges popping up on their dashboard late last week. These badges are our way of giving back to those users that have played a special role in helping to improve our community. Whether it be through friend referrals, or through helping to translate Plurk into other languages or from starting any one of the great fan blogs about Plurk (see the unofficial list on the left navigation bar), we just wanted to say thanks for your continued support in helping make Plurk better for everyone, new and old. We’ve got a total of over 10 unique badges now and you’ll see more popping up here or there in the coming weeks!

• Minor Usability Enhancements - You may have also noticed a few small improvements directly on your timeline, such as: a.) the ability to reply to a plurker directly by clicking on their drop down tab when you hover over their name and clicking ‘reply to’. This is a great way to avoid having to type out “@username” all the time if you want to address someone specific in a conversation. b.) A thin ‘last visited’ line which disappears after a few seconds indicating the last time you were on Plurk. This is useful so you can quickly scan all those new Plurks since the time you were last on and start from the right place. c.) When checking out new unread Plurk responses by clicking the notification marker at bottom left, we now take you back to the oldest Plurk with a response rather than to the newest Plurk with a response. Our thinking is that when you want to get caught up on Plurk responses you missed, you want to read the timeline from right to left or from the oldest Plurk responses to the newest so we’ve now made this little enhancement automatic so you dont have to scroll back in time to get caught up.

• Newer, Fresher Browse Page - We’ve updated the Interesting Plurkers page to include a view of more Plurkers that you may want to follow. We found that a lot of users are always looking to connect with other active, popular or new Plurkers in addition to wanting to view the latest stream of activity on the global timeline. Now we’ve made it super easy to connect with other like minded Plurkers.

The above are just some of the many new features we’ve rolled out in the past few weeks. We’ve also added new technicolour Plurk creatures for users with high Karma so check those out if you’re feeling adventurous and want to spice up your Plurk page. Moreover, new users will find the experience to get acquainted with Plurk has also improved and we’ve made it easy to get started by suggesting some other interesting Plurkers who live near you or who share some common interests.

So what’s around the corner? A whole lot more! We’ve got a jam packed next couple of weeks where we’ll be starting to roll out some major enhancements to the service. We’ll also continue to improve our efforts to give back to our most passionate Plurkers so look out for free stuff and a couple of fun promotions coming your way!

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got to get back to work. Cheers everyone and keep on Plurking in the free world!

We let it sink in a bit this time. The serendipity of hitting a friends’ profile and seeing something you wouldn’t quite expect has left a lot of people breathless and buzzing for the past couple of days. And we love that! We also got great early adopter feedback, fixed a few remaining bugs, and ensured we made this new feature super easy to use and share. So what are we talking about exactly? Well, if you haven’t heard it through the Plurkvine already, we’re happy to share with everyone the release of our new CSS profile customization styling feature!

Below is a quick Q & A on key points surrounding this new feature:

What does the custom CSS profile styling feature let me do?

To put it simply, this new styling option allows you to design and change the look and feel of ALL elements on your Plurk profile page; Colours can be changed, backgrounds can be altered and you can mix and match as much as you please.

How do I use it?

Click on ‘edit’ next to “My Profile”, select the “Customize Profile” tab and you’ll see the option to customize your profile even more with CSS. However, you will need a karma score of at least 25 to completely customize everything on your profile. If you need some help with styling your profile, check out our styling help page, or ask a friend for help.

OMG, why are you letting people go wild and create hideous looking pages?

Now hold on, don’t be so quick to judge! While we have a set of 12 standard background, timeline, and dashboard colour options available for everyone (depending on karma level), we found that a lot of you kept requesting that we allow you to style your profile pages to better reflect your own preferences/personality or showcase something that you were passionate about. This is exactly what we did! You see, unlike other social sites on the web where you are forced to spend the majority of your time browsing other users’ tacky or badly designed profile pages, the great thing about Plurk is that since you are mostly confined to spending your time viewing your own timeline page, you very rarely, if ever, are exposed to other users’ pages you can’t stand to look at because you think they are too ugly.

Can I see examples of some of the themes people have designed?

Here are a few that you can install by clicking on them:

Also, feel free to check out some of your friends’ profiles. Alternatively, there’s a great group created over on Flickr where users are showcasing some of their own themes.

How do I share my profile or use someone else’s profile I see and like?

Plurk is all about community, so we’ve made it easy for users to share their profile designs with their friends. Grab the share link off your ‘customize profile’ page and pass it along as you please. If you see a profile page you like, just ask nicely if the user is willing to share; remember though that some people may have spent hours or days on creating their designs so you are encouraged to respect their decision if they do say no.

Enjoy the feature folks, show-off your new themes and remember to plurk responsibly!

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Oh, did we mention, we’re sorry?

For those that missed it, our scheduled 1 hour maintenance window earlier this morning took quite a bit longer than we had anticipated. We admit, it was poor prognostication on our part. And that was bad. But in a way, it was also very good. Why? Plurk underwent a deep cleansing today, added some new features and is now speedier than ever. Here’s what the update means to you:

• The goal of this update was to prepare ourselves for rapid feature deployments without the need to take the site offline to complete them. Like us, we notice Plurkers are very passionate people, so we want to keep you as happy as possible. This update will hopefully allows us to make updates to the site on the fly without the requirement for periods of prolonged downtime.
• We introduced a new tabbed filtering view for the timeline which allows you to better filter out your plurks into: all plurks, just your plurks, and now, just private plurks. The introduction of viewing your ‘private plurks’ was a highly requested feature and now it’s easy to view those more critical plurks from cliques or other friends. (Think of it as an inbox for more intimate communication)
• The update allows us to slice and dice your timeline in more interesting ways and offer you additional filtering options down the road. (So, for example, you will be able to view just those plurks you’ve participated in, just those plurks sent to cliques or just those plurks you’ve favourited….all these features coming soon!)
• We purged a lot of the gunk in Plurk’s arteries and gave it some Aspirin and now it should be livelier and more responsive than ever. We have a few more changes coming by the end of next week that should improve responsiveness even further.

On the downside, we understand that a lot of people lost a lot of karma through no fault of their own due to our longer than projected downtime Plurk went on a bit of an extended holiday, but we know you were still knocking on our door to come visit. Therefore, we think it only fair that we compensate all Plurkers a few extra karma points for our mistakes. Have a look at your karma and you’ll notice we’ve raised it +1 point across the board!

Once again, sorry.

Mark it down on your calendar folks. Today, July 6th, 2008, is a special day in Plurkistan. Yes, today we bear witness to the first Plurker ever to reach the rarefied air that is Plurk Nirvana! Congratulations are in order for WendyKnits, who surpassed Karma of 81 and thus becomes the first member on Plurk to reach Nirvana. To paraphrase the humble words of Neil Armstrong, this is one small step for Plurk, one giant leap for Plurkkind! Congrats again, Wendy.

We have heard your complaints about our old widget (too fat, too orange, not plurktacular enough) and we have improved it vastly, hopefully to the point of plurfection. The new widget features include the following:

• You pick the colors that you like and that best match your website
• You decide the width and height of the widget
• Every user that signs up via your widget will increase your karma and become your fan on Plurk

The new widget can look like this, but it’s really up to you to decide how you want to spice it up:

Grab the widget from the Profile edit tab and start getting your blog readers on Plurk!

We have another widget right around the corner for all you Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo and other social networking junkies.

You Plurkers are truly great people

A few weeks ago, we asked our community to help us translate our base list of qualifiers/verbs into a number of other languages and no sooner than a few hours after publishing our post, we had complete translations for half the requested languages on the list! Now, we are finding that Plurk is something that people from all walks of life, and hundreds of countries, are coming to embrace and the numbers speak for themselves: roughly HALF of all qualifiers used to date are in languages other than English!

Of course, Plurkers kept asking us why we stopped the translation project to just the qualifiers. The truth is, we never stopped–we went back, put our heads together, and discussed the best way to bring Plurk to a wider audience of non-English readers as quickly as possible. Two weeks later, and voila, the Plurk Collaborative Translation Project is born!

The Plurk Collaborative Translation Project (PCTP) is our way of getting Plurkers involved in bringing Plurk to everyone in the world in as many languages as possible. If you love Plurk, and speak, read and write fluently in another language other than English, why not consider joining our project to help make Plurk more accessible to those around you. We’ve made it super easy, and super fun and like everything else on Plurk, we’ll aim to build a great community around all those involved in the PCTP. We’ll even share a small token of our appreciation to thank those involved in bringing Plurk to the people the world over. (And who knows, it might even raise your Karma!)

We started Plurk to revive a conversational spirit around the little things that make up everyone’s lives. One month in, and we are doing a-ok but we know that great conversation doesn’t just happen in English. So let’s help eliminate the language barrier and get everyone in on the fun!

Play + Work. It’s universal. And thanks to your efforts, soon Plurk will be too.

Click here to find out more about Plurk’s Collaborative Translation Project and how you can get involved.

One of the most requested features is ability to search and now you can search for humans ;), everyone’s plurks or plurks on your own timeline!

In the bottom-right of your timeline you can see a little search icon:

After entering a keyword string, the search takes you to our search page:

We have also made it super easy to find people. Some interesting searches:

• Humans from brazil
• Andrews on Plurk
• Plurks about Pizza
• What people currently share
• What people currently feel

We at Plurk take user privacy very seriously and we want to make it easy for users to protect themselves against a few rotten apples. You’ll find that 99.9% of the people you run into Plurkistan are just fab, but every now and then, you’ll run into someone unsavory or spammy.

Well good news, now you can easily block another user using our drop down info box:

A blocked user won’t be able to see your profile, follow you, respond to your plurks or befriend you. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say. More granular goodness to come.

We have now implemented a new (and shiny) algorithm that should be more fair. The new algorithm will give karma points for (generally) positive actions and take karma points for (generally) negative actions.

Examples of positive actions:

• Plurking each day (quality plurking that is)
• Get responses on ones own plurks from other plurkers
• Getting extra fans
• …

Examples of negative actions:

• Karma will be lowered if a user requests friendship and gets rejected
• Getting unfollowed by friends will lower a user’s karma
• Spamming other users with too many plurks
• …

Read more about Plurk’s karma system.

Small extra features

Other than these changes, we have made it possible to more easily follow your karma growth. If you hover over karma, you can see how much you have gained since the last karma update:

Also, when you expand the info box of a user, you’ll now be able to see this user’s karma:

Enjoy the karma updates. We’ve got a lot of goodies in store for the coming week! Stay tuned and keep on plurkin.

One of the most requested feature from plurkers is the ability to ‘mute’ certain plurks so that they won’t receive any future ‘new response’ notifications from it.

Well, be careful of what you wish for.

This will be one of the many more noise-reducing features we will be introducing in near future.

Keep the feedbacks coming and thanks for helping us make plurk-land a better place to hang out.

and yes, the site was down just a while ago while we were pushing out this feature. Sorry about that.