Welcome to Plurk

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.

A quick note that Plurk and the A-team will be taking a scheduled 30-45 minute power nap between 9-10 PM EDT (2-3AM EDT) later today.

That is all.

Plurk. Yuck. Sounds so muck like pork. or bork. We understand there’s sort of a love-hate thing going on with our name. It’s understandable but we’d like to give you some colour on what’s behind the name so you are not as quick to brush it off.

• Plurk as stalkerati central: People + Lurk = Plurk
• Plurk as an amalgam of Play + Work: Play-Work. Plurk is what scientists do. It is the enthusiastic, energetic application of oneself to the task at hand as a child excitedly plays; it is the intense arduous, meticulous work of an artist on their life-long masterpiece; it is joyful work. (credit)
• Plurk as acronym: Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma
• Verb potential: “Oh I googled this –> Oh I plurked it” Easy enough to wrap around in any form. Plurked, plurking, plurkers, plurks. Little p, big P, it’s catchy, snippy and sweet.

So next time you say Plurk, don’t say ewww, but chew on it for a little longer and have a happy day (at work, plurking the day away!).

You can rest easy knowing that every facet of Plurk is built with scaling in mind from day one.  Course, there will always be incidental hiccups along the way (it’s the nature of any experiment).  Today was one of those days.  See Exhibit A, below:

Exhibit A – Not what an NHL regulated hockey stick should look like.

Here’s the 411. There we were merrily minding our own business when we were descended upon by a swarm of A-list twittigentsia.  (We will withhold naming names *cough*) Couple this freak and unexpected publicity with our largely running the service off the backs of a non-production ready dev server and you have a huge performance issue.

Course we had to solve this and solve it fast we did. Now we’ve been able to sweep most of the little bugs underneath the rug and put back on our happy faces till the next probable stress test. (Again, no names will be named) Here is a quick and general rundown of what we did:

• We moved from our beta tested development server to real web boxes that can handle a much much larger load
• We implemented lazy loading of almost everything so it didn’t matter that Leo Laporte had 300+ friends on Plurk
• We added more caching
• We moved profile pictures to Amazon S3

Now Plurk is again running smoothly, but we are feverishly working round the clock to ensure that Plurk stays peppy and fun even with tonnes more users.  As always, please do get in touch with us (w/ browser + version & OS details) if you run into any other glaring issues.