It’s been a productive week over here at Plurk. From implementing heavily requested new features to working on minor usability and functional enhancements, we’ve been paying attention to your needs and ensuring the experience for fellow Plurkers continues to be enjoyable as our community grows. Here’s a quick run down of some of the new features and functional improvements we’ve made:
Improved Sharing Options + Photo Sharing Directly from Plurk
One thing we’re sure you may have noticed is that we improved the “shares” qualifier on Plurk by adding a sub-menu to make it easier to share photos, links and Youtube videos on Plurk. Sharing links and Youtube videos works the same way as before but now new users will find it easier to add a caption or title to these items.
The big change has been the introduction of photo uploading directly from Plurk! You’ll know that Plurk already allows you to share any picture from across the web by linking directly to the picture url; we automatically scale down the pic and create a thumbnail when it is posted in a Plurk. Now, users also have the ability to share pictures directly by uploading them to Plurk!
Picture uploading interface (above) – You can upload pictures of any size and any image format
To prevent abuse, and ensure smooth scalability, we are currently limiting picture uploading to those users with Karma over 25 or those users who’ve verified their mobile phone number with us. If you don’t have a mobile phone or don’t have enough Karma, you can still use any of a number of great free third party image hosting services like Tinypic, Imageshack, or Photobucket.
Better Friend and Fan Navigation Panel
We have also made improvements to the way your friends and fans are displayed on the “My Friends” page.
Now you will see 3 tabs that will help you more easily distinguish the different relationships your have with other people on Plurk:
Mutual Friends – These are your ‘friends’; People who you follow and who follow you back.
People I follow – These are people you are a fan of. You follow them but they do not follow your Plurks.
My Fans – If you allow the whole world to see your Plurks, other people will have the option to follow your Plurks without adding you as a friend. Here you can see the list of all those people who are your fans. If you want to block a specific fan from following you, you may do so by clicking the ‘block and remove’ option for that user.
Interesting Plurker Page Improvements
The easiest way to find new Plurkers that you don’t know but may want to follow is through our Interesting Plurkers page. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been busy tweaking the results of this page so that you’re presented with fresh new users who share some commonality with yourself. Our feeling is that, for the most part, you’re more interested in seeing Plurks from people who:
-Speak the same language as you
-Who live in the same country or city as you
-Who are roughly the same age as you
-Who share similar interests and talk about the same things as you
Social discovery and helping you connect with like minded Plurkers is a big part of ensuring that you can use Plurk not only as a tool to talk about your day to day lives with people that you already know, but as a way of meeting people who will help enrich your Plurk experience and make it more engaging. Of course, you are able to filter more broadly to see Plurks from other users that the default settings don’t offer, but we are always trying to ensure you that you’re presented with those users who we think you might find interesting.
Introducing Plurk Labs!
Plurk Labs is a special area where the A-Team shows off some cool things that are coming down the plurkline. Our first Plurk Labs creation is the Word Cloud and Qualifier/Very Analyzer.
The Word Cloud shows you the words that are most frequently mentioned across your last 800 or so Plurks. It’s a cool way for you to see who or what you tend to Plurk about the most. We’ve also added the Qualifier Analysis which gives you some idea of which qualifiers you use the most and then gives you a quick summary of some of your traits based on usage.
Try it out! (You’ll need to enter your own Plurk username to see your results!)
Plurk Wiki – Because Sharing is Caring
With all the features and improvements the A-Team has been working on and all the great new resources, fan sites and other Plurk inspired creations that are popping up every day, we found that one of the areas we were lacking in was our ability to properly archive, document, keep track of and communicate all these wonderful things. I’m sure you’ll agree with us that we definitely need to update our FAQ and help documentation. And for the longest while, we wanted to create a more exhaustive introduction guide to Plurk for new users. Unfortunately, with only so many hands and eyeballs between the A-Team to go around, we wanted to find a better way to ensure that Plurkers from all countries and in all languages were able to readily find an up-to-date authoritative guide to which they could turn to, to explore everything that Plurk and the Plurk community had to offer.
Expanding on the success of the Plurk Collaborative Translation Project (PCTP), we are pleased to announce the launch of our official Plurk Wiki.
The goal of the Plurk Wiki is to build on some of the great Plurk related documentation and material floating out across the web and create an internally accessible collective knowledgebase from which fellow Plurkers in all languages can turn to for help, to have frequently asked questions answered, and find out more about the service, its features, its users, and the great resources and Plurk inspired projects created by fellow Plurkers.
Our wiki is still a work in progress and we’ve only come out with a very basic framework in English at the moment, but over time, we’re hoping that with your help, the Plurk Wiki evolves into a great repository of everything Plurk related, in as many languages as possible. We encourage you to help lay the groundwork for our wiki by adding any material you think may help users benefit from Plurk.
Plurk Design Contest Reminder – Win a $50 Amazon.com Gift Certificate!
Lastly, and certainly not least, if you haven’t done so already, don’t forget about Plurk’s first ever design contest. We are looking for any original artistic entries which incorporate Plurk in some way. They can be funny tshirts, buttons, videos about Plurk, Plurk emoticons, new badges or anything else! If you’ve already created something before or are planning on creating something, you still have time to submit your entry! Entries are due by September 25th, 2008 and you have the chance to win one of 20 $50 Amazon.com Gift Certificates. Good luck and we look forward to see your entries!
RSS feed