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!

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!

The widget is a great way to share what you and your friends are currently doing on sites outside of Plurk. Visit our widget tab to install the Flash Widget.

Apart from this we have also made it super easy to install our HTML widget on Blogger. Got a Blogger blog? Install the HTML widget with ease.

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!

How passionate are Plurk fans? Here are some examples of the great artwork and media we’ve found out in the wild.

Plurk Comic Strips:

Plurk T-Shirt:

Plurk Icons for your Mac:

Extra Super-Duper Dancing Banana Plurkicons:

Plurk Wallpaper:

Plurk Cookies

Heck, KDFrawg and Squirehogg over at Plurkiverse even created an unofficial Plurk Theme Song called There’s No Business Like Plurk Business! I mean, how cool is that! It had the entire gang over here smiling from ear to ear

Now we want YOU to help us in our first ever Plurktacular Design Contest. The contest is a way for you to share your love of Plurk with the rest of our humble community in a creative way. Let your passion for Plurk loose in Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, on your art easel, with a knitting needle, in your photos or in a video and submit the entry to us on our Plurktacular Design Off page.

Here are some ideas you might want to incorporate in your entries:

• Funny t-shirt ideas
• Stickers, icons, badges, buttons
• New emoticons just for Plurkers
• Funny media. Pictures that incorporate Plurk in someway, videos uploaded to Youtube etc
• Creative videos on why you love Plurk, how you use Plurk, or explaining what the site is all about to new people
• Anything else. Jewelry incorporating the Plurk creatures, sock puppets, Plurk themed food

We’ll feature the 20 best entries once our first contest ends on September 25th and award our winners each with a $50 Amazon.com Gift Certificate.

And if you don’t win this time around, just wait for our next contest! We have some great contests planned for our users in the coming months. We’re also going to thinking of ways to give back to all the users who’ve already helped us out in some shape or form (by starting Plurk related sites, helping us with PCTP, or just helping new users with the service) . Stay tuned.

Here’s how to get involved:

1. Download Plurk’s Art Pack and the submission rules of the contest
2. Submit an entry on our submission page before September 25th, 2008! (You may submit something already out in the wild that you’ve created before which incorporates Plurk!)
3. Sit back and wait a week and we’ll announce the first round of winners on October 1st!

Have fun and good luck to everyone involved. We can’t wait to see and share some of the entries with all our fellow Plurkers!

• 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!

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!

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.

• 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.