Daily Photo

After the picture has been uploaded, you will then be able to plurk it as you wish.

User examples

Plurk users have been using this feature to document many things, including bird attacks and stick figure violence…

Pets and toys…

General shenanigans…

And even pictures of your latest fans on Plurk!

Other photo options

If Daily Photo feature isn’t for you, you can still upload photos to Plurk via the qualifier as usual.

I Think this Vonnegut thing is finally going to work tonight. For information on the rationale for the event, take a look here:

Plurktalk Late Night - Vonnegut

but carefully ignore the date. It happens tonight. We have had much difficulty in getting this idea off the ground, but it’s finally going to work.

We’re going to do the regular show first, of course, probably 90 minutes of it, or maybe 120. Nothing changes about that. Then I’m going to shoo everyone but Laura and Willfall off camera and we’re going to talk about the Kurt Vonnegut book A Man Without a Country. We hope that you all stay and participate in the chat room, which the three of us will watch. I hope that this will be interesting, of course. If it is, we will do this often with different books and ideas, and with additional guests spotlighted in the discussion. There will always be required reading to be a Late Night guest.

Wednesday, August 5, at 8:00 pm Central Time (Late Night Later)
URL: http://www.stickam.com/plurktalk

You can watch and or listen just by going to that address. To participate, audio or video, you will have to join Stickam and friend user plurktalk. The Stickam system is sometimes slow in processing friend requests, so try to do this early. We will do a couple of announcements of the show today on Plurk. We will also use Plurk to ask for the topics you would like to see discussed during this show. If you miss those and want to see a particular topic discussed, please leave it as a comment to this post. Still no tutorial on joining Stickam, life has been entertainingly full.

I’m KDFrawg on Plurk and I hope you come to tonight’s PlurkTalk.

Plurk poem

New Plurk user winterchild has written a poem about Plurk (who else?). Read the wonderful little ditty here!

Timeline improvements

In late June, we also optimized the viewing experience of Plurk for people with smaller screens (i.e. 1024×768), by making the timeline height variable. The timeline should now shrink if the window size is less than 500, hopefully making it easier for you to view your plurks.

Mark All As Read confirmation

Recently, we also added a confirmation button to the Mark All As Read option. The confirmation button only appears if you have more than 50+ unread plurks, or have unread private, own, or responded plurks, and should help to eliminate the problem of MAARing accidentally.

Music sharing

It is now possible to play and find music on Plurk via YouTube.

Step 1: Select the YouTube option from the “shares” qualifier.

Step 2: Find your video/music using the onsite YouTube search.

Step 3: When you add it, others will be able to play the audio in a player (located at the bottom right of your timeline).

We hope you have enjoyed the new features, but there’s still a lot more to come. Expect some big developments in the upcoming months…

Until then, team on!

Well, we seem to have blown a Vonnegut fuse. I personally cheated on the Vonnegut thing, having read the book before announcing that it would be a good idea to talk about the concepts. But Ms. Pritcharddesign went to help her sister move and Willfall’s landlord dropped a wrench on his car and the wheels sort of came off the idea of doing it this week. So, we’re doing the Vonnegut Late Night discussion next week, the 29th. We do need a discussion topic for tonight, some grand philosophical question that would engage us, but would not require reading a book. We’d be happy to think, but no more books yet, okay?

If you have an idea, leave it in a comment here, or let me know on Plurk.

Wednesday, July 22, at 8:00 pm Central Time
URL: http://www.stickam.com/plurktalk

You can watch and or listen just by going to that address. To participate, audio or video, you will have to join Stickam and friend user plurktalk. The Stickam system is sometimes slow in processing friend requests, so try to do this early. We will do a couple of announcements of the show today on Plurk. We will also use Plurk to ask for the topics you would like to see discussed during this show. If you miss those and want to see a particular topic discussed, please leave it as a comment to this post. Still no tutorial on joining Stickam, life has been entertainingly full.

I’m KDFrawg on Plurk and I dare you to show up tonight’s PlurkTalk.

Wednesday, July 15, at 8:00 pm Central Time
URL: http://www.stickam.com/plurktalk

You can watch and or listen just by going to that address. To participate, audio or video, you will have to join Stickam and friend user plurktalk. The Stickam system is sometimes slow in processing friend requests, so try to do this early. We will do a couple of announcements of the show today on Plurk. We will also use Plurk to ask for the topics you would like to see discussed during this show. If you miss those and want to see a particular topic discussed, please leave it as a comment to this post. Still no tutorial on joining Stickam, life has been entertainingly full.

I’m KDFrawg on Plurk and I dare you to show up tonight’s PlurkTalk.

Wednesday, June 17, at 8:00 pm Central Time
URL: http://www.stickam.com/plurktalk

You can watch and or listen just by going to that address. To participate, audio or video, you will have to join Stickam and friend user plurktalk. The Stickam system is sometimes slow in processing friend requests, so try to do this early. We will do a couple of announcements of the show today on Plurk. We will also use Plurk to ask for the topics you would like to see discussed during this show. If you miss those and want to see a particular topic discussed, please leave it as a comment to this post. Still no tutorial on joining Stickam, life has been entertainingly full.

I’m KDFrawg on Plurk and I dare you to show up tonight’s PlurkTalk.

It is now possible to mute/unmute plurks, mark all plurks as read, and delete plurks… Straight from your mobile!
Unread plurks are now displayed in chronological order (newest first), and the input boxes no longer allow you to type more than 140 characters. Unread responses have also been fixed, and are indicated in bold.

Mute/unmute

Mark all as read

Deleting plurks

Mobile Plurk can be accessed from plurk.com/m.

New emoticon:

We here at Plurk are committed to giving rewards to our most active users. Plurkers with 100 karma can now take advantage of a new exclusive emoticon. Typing “(taser)” or “(rammi)” will result in , as shown in

Happy tasering plurking!

Looking back, this past 1 year has been a momentous and joyful ride. As our previous blog post stated, Plurk has ALWAYS been about fun from day one. We also want to let you know how much fun we are having building this little beast and watching it grows up. Happy birthday.

Alvin Keynote on Plurk 1st Birthday Party from Eric Chen on Vimeo.

Wow. It really feels like we just launched our vibrant community only yesterday and yet here we are now, exactly one year later, and we still can’t believe how fast and furious the ride has been and how far we’ve all come in such a short period of time. What’s that old saying again? Time flies when you’re having fun……AND Plurking! So true.

And the truth is, Plurk has ALWAYS been about fun from day one. We wanted to create a fun, social, laid back and collaborative social community unlike any other on the web–one that let people be themselves, one with genuine, positive, good-hearted people, and one which unified everyone, young and old, the world over, to share and discuss their lives with others. One year later, and the results speak for themselves: Plurk has quickly and quietly grown from what was one of the best kept secrets on the web to what is now the fastest growing social media service in Asia and one of the fastest growing websites in the world today! Clearly, it appears you all embraced Plurk the way we hoped you would, and for that we couldn’t be more grateful.

Of course, our growth this past year would be nothing were it not for the great team behind the service. Words do not even begin to describe the passion, heart, intensity, grit and hundred other adjectives for sheer hard-working tenacity that is the embodiment of all the members on the A-team. They never cease to amaze me and chances are you’ll be hearing a lot more about the humble and truly remarkable people who have made Plurk what it is today very shortly.

Here’s looking forward to another magical year ahead with all of you.

Plurk…it’s written in the stars.

Wednesday, June 10, at 8:00 pm Central Time
URL: http://www.stickam.com/plurktalk

You can watch and or listen just by going to that address. To participate, audio or video, you will have to join Stickam and friend user plurktalk. The Stickam system is sometimes slow in processing friend requests, so try to do this early. We will do a couple of announcements of the show today on Plurk. We will also use Plurk to ask for the topics you would like to see discussed during this show. If you miss those and want to see a particular topic discussed, please leave it as a comment to this post. Still no tutorial on joining Stickam, life has been entertainingly full.

I’m KDFrawg on Plurk and I look forward to seeing you tonight’s PlurkTalk.

Tuesday, May 19, at 8:00 pm Central Time
URL: http://www.stickam.com/plurktalk

You can watch and or listen just by going to that address. To participate, audio or video, you will have to join Stickam and friend user plurktalk. The Stickam system is sometimes slow in processing friend requests, so try to do this early. We will do a couple of announcements of the show today on Plurk. We will also use Plurk to ask for the topics you would like to see discussed during this show. If you miss those and want to see a particular topic discussed, please leave it as a comment to this post. Still no tutorial on joining Stickam, life has been entertainingly full.

I’m KDFrawg on Plurk and I look forward to seeing you tonight’s PlurkTalk.

Finally, we can all breathe a collective sigh of relief! It’s been by far and away the most requested feature since we first launched Plurk less than a year ago. And now, thanks to many days and nights of tireless coding, we are glad to present you all with the first release of our real time conversational search engine.

What is Real Time Social Conversational Search?

Let’s backtrack a bit and discuss the search space in high level. In the taxonomy of search engines, everyone is already familiar with structure based static web search engines such as Google or Yahoo. These search engines, which have been around for about a decade, use search engine spiders which conduct link-based analysis to crawl, index, query and rank static textual data found all over the web using an algorithmic approach. And they work super well.

A search after swine flu on Plurk Real Time Search.

Over the past several years, there has also been the emergence of a new branch of more social search/news/recommendation services which mine the collective intelligence and behaviours of many to present crowdsourced results that allow users to get a more filtered or personalized view of things that may appeal to them. Think of services such as StumbleUpon or Delicious which mine the browsing/bookmarking habits of a general and more techie audience respectively, or services like Digg and Reddit which let users pull the most salient and buzzing day to day news pieces, or a social recommendation service like Last.fm which crawls and analyzes your musical-DNA to find other users who have similar tastes or helps you find other music that may appeal to you.

Fast forward now to social real-time conversation search. Social conversation search differs from existing forms of search in a couple of ways. There’s a big emphasis here on recency—that is, Plurk’s conversational search lets you get almost instantaneous feedback and reaction from real people on the issues and events shaping the world today. Want to know how people are reacting to the latest Swine Flu outbreaks? Just search for it and get in the conversation. The other benefit of social search comes from the ‘social’ part of the experience. Social search is more about human interconnectedness, subjective inquiry (asking and getting a view into more touchy/feely topics rather than questions that have hard answers) and is a more open window into the experiential lives of others than existing forms of search.

Plurk – It’s Much Bigger than you think

Of course, the biggest problem that Plurk Search attempts to tackle is the one of social discovery. It allows you to find and connect with people just like YOU by giving you a window into how BIG the Plurk community really is. While Plurk has grown steadily bigger each and every week since we first launched, the problem for users has always been that they could not easily see or benefit from this growth themselves– Since users ONLY see their own timelines 99% of the time, it has not always been easy to quickly find other like minded people or participate in real-time conversation that interest you unless a lot of your in-real-life friends were on Plurk or you were a major celebrity. Plurk Search finally solves this problem and opens up access to the vast pool of public conversations taking place over Plurk, helping make you more social, which has always been our underlying goal. Now it is easier than ever to connect with others who share your interests, passions, perspectives and feelings and see how rich the conversational experience is on Plurk all around the world.

Some Notes About Plurk’s Real Time Social Search

Plurk Search will be a rapidly evolving product here at Plurk and as we’ve mentioned, this first release is moreso an effort for us to stress test and tune search to scale to tens of millions of day to day user queries or more. Once we are comfortable with the performance of Plurk Search, we plan to quickly add more advanced features such as response indexing, on-the-fly language-to-language translations (After all, we are a global focused service aimed that aspires to make accessible all real time conversation, no matter in what language), date/timeline filtering (only retrieve matching Plurks between a certain time period), trending topics/phrases, and deeper, more accurate sentiment matching. Some other things to keep in mind:

Plurk search respects your privacy: One of the most important things Plurk Search does is ensure that the results returned are tailor matched to YOU. If you have private Plurks on your timeline, you can rest assured knowing that only you will be able to see those results in any searches conducted

Plurk search does not currently index responses: For this first release, queries are only matched against root Plurks. If you searched for ‘food’, at this time, we do not currently return results where the word ‘food’ appears in a response. Why? With this initial release, we want to ensure a stable and consistent experience which we can do so by keeping our total search index size manageable. Plurk is well on its way to reaching over 1 Billion aggregate responses, and if we were to index these at this time, it would likely put a damper on the quality of the search experience.

Sample Search Queries:

Below, we have provided some sample queries which will give you a good idea of how to make the most of our new search feature:

• YouTube videos that Plurk users love:
  http://www.plurk.com/psearch#q=youtube+loves

• Most recent plurks about the swine flu:
  http://www.plurk.com/psearch#q=swine+flu

• There are thousands of Plurker’s that celebrate their birthday each day:
  http://www.plurk.com/psearch#q=happy+birthday

Once again, we want to thank you our loyal Plurkers for having the patience to wait with us all this time while we built out our search product. We can tell you that this is just the start of a wonderful new extension to your Plurk experience. Take it out for a spin, tell us what you think, and let’s continue to work together to make Plurk even better for all the wonderful, new people that discover our little slice of heaven on the web.

Fellow Plurkers, we have some very troubling news to report to our beloved community today. Like many other prominent sites such as Google, Youtube and Wikipedia before it, Plurk has now joined the ranks of sites that have been officially banned in China.

We first discovered the ban late last week while one of our A-Team members was conducting a routine check of our web traffic logs. He was surprised to see that site wide traffic requests from China came to a standstill on the evening of April 22, 2009. After investigating and conducting some further tests, we were able to confirm that Plurk indeed had been placed behind the Great Firewall of China, restricting access to the site from all of mainland China.

This is what it looks like when China thinks we are bad people:

What is most unsettling is that up until now, we still have received no information from official Chinese sources on what prompted the ban. Was it some Plurkers talking negatively about China? Was it some internal dissidents using Plurk as a means to communicate with other like minded people? The truth is, we are not sure. However, we have been working over the last few days to get some additional information from some of our Chinese users and from official sources on why Plurk was banned and hope to restore access to our growing community of Chinese users as soon as possible.

The ban clearly is bittersweet for us here Plurk. On the one hand, it confirms a few things to us:

1. Plurk is a truly revolutionary communication platform that has the power to help people converse with each other in real time about the things that are happening around them. Clearly some of these conversations our users have been having may have upset Chinese officials but we are not entirely sure.

2. It is also an indication that Plurk has reached a sufficient critical mass of users that it is on the radar screen of someone like the Chinese Government. We are proud to have our name amongst the likes of internet giants such as Google, Youtube and Wikipedia which have also faced similar censorship in the past. As more and more people are beginning to realize, we are working on starting a social communication revolution here and the world is finally taking notice.

On the other hand, we all feel very strongly against any form of censorship. Plurk is a communication platform that is meant to liberate and democratize social communication between anyone and everyone, no matter where they are in the world. Stifling discussion and restricting free speech is never a good way to go.

We are also not sure why Plurk has been singled out here when there are many other similar services which allow the free flow dialogue of information between users, both operating inside and outside China. Why is China threatened by Plurk? We need to find this out and if you have any information on why Plurk was banned or what we can do to have China lift the ban, please contact us.

Finally, we ask Plurkers to please help spread the word about Plurk’s ban in China. Tell your friends, tell local newspapers and media websites and help China reconsider its actions. We are confident that with enough support and awareness, China will lift this ban and Plurk will again be well on its way to becoming the worlds most beloved communication platform!

Vive la Plurk!

Wednesday, May 13, at 8:00 pm Central Time
URL: http://www.stickam.com/plurktalk

You can watch and or listen just by going to that address. To participate, audio or video, you will have to join Stickam and friend user plurktalk. The Stickam system is sometimes slow in processing friend requests, so try to do this early. We will do a couple of announcements of the show today on Plurk. We will also use Plurk to ask for the topics you would like to see discussed during this show. If you miss those and want to see a particular topic discussed, please leave it as a comment to this post. Still no tutorial on joining Stickam, life has been entertainingly full.

I’m KDFrawg on Plurk and I look forward to seeing you tonight’s PlurkTalk.

1.) our recommended plurkers page
Using our not-so-secret recipe, we have built a simple robot that recommends plurkers you might find interesting. This robot takes into consideration various factors such as your age, location and matching keywords. You can find a list of your recommended friends by going to the bottom of your ‘Find/Invite friends’ page. There you will find a list of 9 plurkers with basic info such as picture, age and location. We compile a new list every now and then so be sure to check back often!

2.) location and keyword search
Our plurker search is another useful way to discover new people. For example, you can search by country name and it will list out all the plurkers that come from that country and you can sort the result by gender, karma or age. Here’s a list of plurkers from Taiwan. And it’s not just limited to country name – try city, state or district. You can also search by keyword such as ‘warcraft‘, ‘second life‘, ‘soccer‘ and etc. Our search page is accessible from the bottom right of your timeline or you can go directly to plurk.com/search

3.) interesting plurker page
Interesting plurker page is the place where we display some of the most interesting data about plurkiverse. The page itself is auto-customized so that it only show data that is close to your location. On this page, you will find interesting things like new plurkers, most popular plurkers, latest plurks, most interesting plurks and etc. You can also filter the timeline to show plurks that are relevant to your interest.

As a summary, these were some of the issues we faced:

• We had servers scattered around our datacenter. This often made it difficult for various servers to talk to each other easily (extra overhead, multiple points of failure, etc.).
• Disk and filesystem space issues.
• MySQL replication issues, database log storage constraints.
• Server migrations and consolidations.

What have we done to rectify these problems?

• We consolidated all our servers into connected racks which lie next to each other: During the January 13 (GMT) downtime we migrated most of our previously scattered servers.
• Enabled more proactive server monitoring. We’ve tuned our notification thresholds and started to monitor a whole slew of new parameters to alert us early so we can quickly fix potential problems before they get out of hand.
• Updated MySQL; optimize our tables; monitor disk usage and purge binary logs as soon as the log space usage reaches a certain threshold.
• Make our cache servers more robust so you’re served content faster without long wait times.
• Kernel tuning to increase network performance.

We’re still continuing to work everyday on improving our infrastructure and managing our growth to keep issues to a bare minimum in the future. Of course with how passionate you guys all are, I know even a few minutes of downtime can seem like an eternity, so when we do hit snags and have prolonged outage windows, we get just as panicky as you, if not much more so. All that said, we’ve been sailing very smoothly (knock on wood!) and look for a wonderful February with you all!

But sometimes we can only do so much. The gray line between verbal harassment and freedom of speech is thin enough to give us daily headaches when dealing with different situations reported by our users. The best solution seems to be to give our users enough ammo to protect themselves and at the same time, help us police plurkiverse. Here are some of the available options:

How to restrict your timeline so that it’s only viewable to your friends?
You can choose to restrict your timeline so that it is only viewable to you, or your friends, or your friends of friends. Click ‘My Account’ from the top right of your timeline, follow by ‘Privacy’. Choosing the ‘friends only’ option will also prevent people from becoming your fan.

How to hide your date of birth and location?
For extra privacy, you can choose to hide your date of birth and location from the ‘My Profile’ panel. To hide your date of birth, simply choose ‘Month’, ‘Day’, ‘Year’ for each of the drop downs.

To hide your location, un-select the check box that says ‘Show my location to others’.

How to unfollow your annoying friends without them knowing?
Another cool feature that allows you to un-follow your talkative friend’s plurk without actually removing them as friend is the ‘Timeline follow’ feature. From ‘My Friends’ panel, you can see a list of your friends and on the right side of each friend, you can see a couple of toggle buttons. Click on the Timeline Follow button to switch on or off your friend follow status. Both of you will still remain friends and he/she doesn’t even know you have stopped following their plurks . Save the awkward moment for later.

How to block bad plurker?
Sometimes when people gets really, really bad, you might have to use the ultimate weapon – block. Blocked user will not be able to see your timeline or your plurks, or request friendship or become your fan and will remain so until you unblock them. You can block a plurker from a couple of places: by hovering over a nickname in your timeline.

or by going to their profile page dashboard. Look for the block button on top right hand side.