Welcome to Plurk

As I alluded to in my previous entry, Plurk endeavours to take a wholly global approach in how we let our users communicate with each other.  To this end, one of the fanciful features I’m sure most of you’ll discover, especially if English isnt your mother tongue, is our support for colour coded verbs/qualifiers in a host of other languages.  Click the “Plurk privacy and options” tab underneath the Plurk box on your timeline and you’ll see the current list of supported languages for qualifiers/verbs which include German, Russian, French, Chinese, Danish and Russian.  In an effort to broaden our appeal to a wider audience, we’re looking to you to help us translate the base stock of English qualifiers/verbs into additional languages.  Here are the ones we’d love to add:

• Spanish
• Portuguese
• Italian
• Arabic
• Malay
• Tagalog/Filipino
• Japanese
• Polish
• Korean

If you think you might be able to help out, please do get in touch with us!  Of course, if there are other unsupported languages you’d like to see on Plurk, also give us a shout and we’ll add them to the queue. 

Briefly after launching Plurk, we carefully thought about what the essence of Plurk was. Why do we create what we create? What prompted the need for Plurk? How do we take our collective and shared values and experiences and bring them into the application that you see on this site? After deliberating long and hard, we were able to distil our values and vision for Plurk into 4 overriding mantras.

The 4 Tenets of Plurk and the A-Team (ahem, this is us)

1. Look beyond the periphery - Think Global, Act….Global

Hailing originally from 5 countries, 3 continents, and collectively fluent in at least 10 different languages, we’re cognizant of the values of looking at things from a variety of perspectives. The confluence and blend of a cross section of diverse cultures and growth/learning experiences allows us to avoid the sort of localized myopia that is often seen pervading many new Internet applications these days. Of course, these collective differences mean that we fight, we bicker, and we disagree, all the time in fact, but we tend to do so with reason. And that reason is that we are passionate about creating the best web applications for the mass of people the world over. Conversely, we try not to subvert ourselves to any pervading groupthink. There’ll always be transient noise and riff-raff on the web, periods of ramp up and periods of glut, distorting the harmony and meaningful possibilities the web was originally intended for. We don’t focus on the short-term or the short-sighted. We’ll always be looking beyond the 100th window.

2. Go beyond FUBU.

No, by FUBU we’re not referring to the urban clothing company. Cop their apparel for all we care. What we are talking about is the idea of a ‘for us, by us’ mentality and this largely ties into our first tenet. The web is aglow with ever new applications bursting at the seams with wondrous displays of technical and visual mastery on the part of brilliant developers and design architects. The problem however is that most of these applications continue to be developed for the same narrow group of highly technical, always wired, power users. We ask ourselves, how many more social bookmarkers, task management applications, content management systems and rss readers does the world really need? These are things which don’t register on the palette of REAL web users. We desired to create an application with low barriers to entry for REAL people; people who’ve likely never been exposed to buzzwords like rss, ajax, or podcast. Don’t get us wrong, we love to eat our own dogfood, but we put real effort to ensure that our dogfood tastes good to all breeds of dogs around the world, and not just some small band of cliquish poodles who gather for crumpets every afternoon while sipping on their macchiatos and waxing philosophical on things that don’t matter.

3. A passion to push the envelope — the money never matters

It’s about identifying unmet needs and working passionately toward change. The same mantra which led us to develop the first user generated free video hosting community on the Internet 24 months before there was ever a Youtube. Plurk has not been created by dozens of people quickly assembled together to work on it and push it out per the demands of venture capitalists or bankers looking for a quick cashout. Rather we are a close-knit and agile team of some of the most consummate and hard working young web pioneers (developers, architects, interface designers, security experts) out there who have serendipitously come together guided by a vision to always create change and push the envelope of what should be possible on the web. All guts, no glory, as they say, but of course the limelight never mattered. We create because we are artists.

4. Simplify.

We hate clutter; emotional, physical, on the web, or otherwise. We absolutely hate it. Why unnecessarily complicate things or aggravate your users? We take solace in striving towards beautiful simplicity. Google, now that’s simple. The same text box which has stared us gleefully in the face now for over a decade. We ascribe to the same notion–that all levels of complexity should be hidden from our user as much as possible. Of course, behind every corner, you’ll find shiny new goodies which will only make your Plurk experience that much more enjoyable but we want to ensure that the basic premise of the application is something that ANY user, whether they’re 13 or 99 years old, will get within mere seconds of visiting and using the site. We don’t want you to have to think too hard about how Plurk works, leave that to us. We just want you to use it.

“Marky got with Sharon, And Sharon got Sharice, She was sharing Sharon’s outlook, On the topic of disease, Mikey had a facial scar, And Bobby was a racist, They were all in love with dyin, They were doin’ it in Texas’…. You never know just how you look, Through other people’s eyes” Butthole Surfers - Pepper

Psst, let me tell you something. Ready? Well it turns out you are a celebrity. No word of a lie! Ok, alright, lets cut the hyperbole for a sec. Truth is you’re probably not going to be the next Tom Cruise or Hilary Duff, but to a small and trusty circle of friends and family, and perhaps even strangers, you are constantly orbiting around their galaxy of thoughts and every silly, wonderful, magical, little thing you do, say, feel or desire, from tying your shoelaces, to feeling blue, to baking a yummy banana loaf bread, is important to them. It really doesn’t matter what you do or how trivial it may seem to you, but other people who know you deeply want to know EVERYTHING about you.

Call it living vicariously through the lives of others, call it self-indulgent instant gratification tripe for the masses, or call it whatever you want but there’s no denying the fact that the last few years have been the heyday in the emergence and glamourization of microcelebrity culture and user generated content across the web. From Youtube to Myspace, and Photobucket to Imeem, people are sharing all facets of their lives digitally with those around them. Of course, one of the hangups we found with these existing social networks and user generated sites was that they were so, to borrow a corny informercial punchline, ‘Ronco Showtime Rotisseriesque’–ya know, the whole “set it, and forget it!” catchphrase. Nevermind.

To put it more bluntly, we always had a bit of a gripe with the existing patch of social networks on the web.  Apart from minor differentiation in geographic, vertical, age-based and socio-economic targeting, they were all rather indistinguishable and chock full of the same hackneyed and static monotony–Users filled out the obligatory profile with the same ole, same ole (favourite music, movies, quotes, relationship status, yada yada), added a requisite number of ‘friends’ they hardly knew, threw up a few pictures, and then twiddled their thumbs waiting for comments and asked themselves “now what”. Is this it? Yes, that really was it. Course once all your friends were on one network, it really became tough to jump ship and find a new home so you stuck around anyway even though you grew restless of it.  On the other side of the track, there were those other few artsy kids and girly-girls who maintained their own blogs (ewww blog..what an antiquated and offputting word), y’know the ones. The ones who spent entirely too much time pining endlessly about love forlorn, cutting and pasting catchy song lyrics and movie quotes (yes I realize the irony of mentioning this given the title of this post and the opening line ring back to a famous movie and kitchsy 90s punk song. Boo hoo, sue me.) that rang true, and spewing endlessly about riff-raff that never really mattered anyway.  And there you had the two sides of the user generated coin, the social network and the blog: one for your outward persona, a bit too passive while usually broadly accessible, the other more inward focused for a smaller group of more verbose types.

We wanted to try and find a happy medium between the two: between the weighty introspective self-indulgent gratification of blogs and mass-market accessible rah-rah-sis-boom-bah showoffyness of social networks. At the same time, we wanted to try to invent a communication form that hit a sweetspot between the ’slow as molasses hold your breath and hope for a response’ sluggishness of email and the ‘can’t ignore this $(*#!$!$#’ obligation of responding to always on instant messaging. And after countless weeks and months of burning the midnight oil and endless tinkering and retinkering, we created and launched Plurk. Put simply, Plurk is all about quickly (no deep introspection required!) and easily documenting and sharing with your friends and family all these little itty bitty things that scatter around and clog your brain in a wicked sweet format that makes sense. We call it a social journal for your life. We think it’s pretty rad and we hope you will too.

Cheers,

The A-Team