Plurku is a free plurk client that allows you to send plurk and receive updates plurs.

This app allows you to plurk directly from your iPhone/iPod touch.
You can:
* View your timeline
* Read and respond to plurks on your timeline
* Compose plurks.

Plurku

The feature that I love most about Plurk is Karma. Every time I check Plurk, which is usually after breakfast, the first thing I do is to see how high my Karma points are. I would then try to calculate how many days it would take for me to go up another 1.00 while figuring out what random thought to Plurk first or what interesting news, media, and articles I can share with my Plurk friends and fans.

I guess I have my gamer self to blame for wanting to always gain Karma boosts. Every 1.00 is a level achieved and every 0.01 to 0.99 is experience gained from Plurking, responding to my friends’ plurks, and sharing all kinds of hullaballoo like news, pictures, YouTube videos, and articles of all sorts of topics. It’s always an achievement for me whenever my Karma increases and a downer whenever I’ve forgotten to freeze before leaving for a family outing or when I’m too busy to remember to update my profile.

So until I’ve reached Enlightenment, a.k.a. total Nirvana at 100, here are some tips I’d like to share with you when boosting your Karma points:

• Complete your profile. Uploading a picture and entering your current location can already boost Karma for you.
• Plurk regularly. You don’t have to Plurk a hundred times a week or twenty times a day. Just Plurk at least a couple of times to show that you’re an active member with hopes of reaching Nirvana and the Plurk gods will notice you.
• Plurk interesting stuff. The internet is brimming with all kinds of interesting stuff. Just yesterday for example, I plurked about how a male bedbug would drill a hole into his female counterpart because the latter normally doesn’t have a vagina ready for mating.
• Reply to your friends’ plurks. The reason why Plurk is considered a social networking site is because you can connect and share with your Plurk buddies. In my opinion, this is probably the feature that gives Plurk an edge over other micro-blogging sites. You get to comment and reply to other Plurks whether your replies are of amazement or fury.
• Invite friends to join your network. If you have a classmate who’s on Plurk, check out his or her list of friends and you might just find someone who you’d like to invite into your network. I did this with one of my best friends and found WilliamShakespeare to which I clicked on the Add as a Friend button on his profile immediately.
• DON’T SPAM. Definitely Plurk will remind you of this whenever you attempt to or accidentally plurk the same message more than 5 times.
• Freeze it. Karma freeze is a feature reserved if you are going to be away from the Plurk world for a long period of time. If you think you won’t be able to plurk in a week or two, freeze your account. The 1.00 Karma spent will keep you from losing probably 3-5 Karma points for inactivity.

Each time I log on to Plurk, it’s always a new adventure unfolding before me. The Karma just makes it even more entertaining, especially with all the new smilies, the badges, and friends who complain about how high your Karma points are than theirs. Sure, at the end of the road all this is going to stop, but I’d like to immerse myself in the fun process of getting to that end while I’m still at 93.49.

On June 16, 2008, I joined Plurk. I had been hearing about it for a few days from some friends, and finally caved in and joined.

Almost two months later, I was one of a group of nine friends. We were friends from different parts of the country. Plurk united and brought together people who would not have otherwise met.

Well, almost two years has passed since then. Our original group became very close…then everyone eventually went on their own way.

I am now the proud member of a group of probably thirty friends. I don’t know what I would do without these people. These people, this website…it has completely changed my life. I’m not the same person now that I was two years ago.

Now, I have better friends than I have ever had in my life. I am dating a beautiful girl. I have gotten two of my friends together who would not have otherwise met.

I don’t know where I would be without Plurk. Thank you, creators of Plurk, so much. I can’t express how grateful I am.

It's been a year or longer since I stated I was dumping Twitter for Plurk (I joined in 2008), but to be honest, I was back on Twitter within the day. My network was bigger on Twitter and I had more folks reading there than Plurk. However, since Kevin Honeycutt's preso at TEC-SIG, I've taken the time to login to Plurk more often and see what might happen. Although every blog entry I write goes through Ping.fm and gets shared on Plurk, Twitter, and Buzz simultaneously, I've found myself coming back to Plurk.


Maybe it's this Pew survey that has me taking a long look at Plurk again, maybe not:


A survey by Pew and Elon found that 85 percent of 895 "technology stakeholders" and pundits agreed that the Internet has mostly been a positive force in peoples' social lives. Social benefits of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Apps will outweigh the negatives over the next decade because e-mail, social networks, and other Web services offer low friction ways to forge and rediscover social ties that make a difference in people's lives.


Here's why I'm having fun with Plurk now:


1. On Plurk, I get the benefit of an aggregated conversation. Instead of looking at a timeline of tweets that I have to make sense of, it's easier to "peek" in and see what people are chatting about. That means, if I see something someone is writing about, its 100% for sure that follow up comments will be directly relevant.


2. The desktop interfaces for Plurk have improved...sort of. When working on Plurk, I couldn't imagine trying to use it much with it's sideways scrolling monstrosity of a site. Fortunately, their mobile page is much easier to work with and APIs--ways that other software can interface with Plurk--have made it easier to work with. Now, you can find a variety of clients that will interface with Plurk well, such as:


Bitter for Windows computers.
Plurker (in beta) - a very nice Plurk client (shown to the right, above) that needs Adobe Air to work. Best of the desktop plurk tools so far but still missing...something.


Fluid App is still around and works fine on Mac. This is now my primary interface. During setup, you can have it point to the Mobile Plurk interface (plurk.com/m) if you prefer that (I do), or just do the regular Plurk.com address. Compare FluidApp to Prism on Windows. Both setup up a web site on your browser as a clickable button and are focused on that. (image here)


Mobile Phone Apps are better. PlurQ and/or Pluroid work great for Android phones. iPhone users (e.g. Plurkapp for Iphone, iPlurk) will have to tell me what works for them!


And, though it's not much of a feature, Plurk has this underdog feel to it. It simply lacks all the neat stuff available for Twitter but maybe, that's not what it's about.


Plurk Designs


That said, you can also enhance the design of your Plurk look...unfortunately, many of these images for the Plurk designs are hosted on Photobucket. To get around the error messages (bandwidth exceeded), you can do what I did earlier today...upload the images for your favorite Plurk design to somewhere else (e.g. PicasaWeb) and then relink the images.


edit your CSS, and look for any photobucket images. Download those and then put them online at a web host of your choice, relink


Some online sites where you can find plurk designs/layouts; beware that some may cost money, and mix the free ones in...so be careful:

• http://plurk-layout.com/
• http://www.plurkdesigns.com/
• http://plurklayouts.com/about/about-plurk-layouts/
• http://www.flickr.com/groups/plurkthemes/pool/
• http://www.plurkthemes.com/
• http://peacepiece.wordpress.com/
• http://www.plurktemplates.com/themes_select

After installing my design of choice, I downloaded all the images that it linked to on Photobucket and put them up on PicasaWeb.google.com.

How To Make Friends

While interacting with others is the key to any social media tool, sometimes you want to just get in the same conversation. The easiest way to accomplish that is to find someone you trust (who is on Plurk already) and then scoop up all THEIR friends.

Of course, another approach is to ask people to welcome you, etc.

So far, these are the things I've run into while getting back into Plurk.

Yow there Plurk fanatics! Plurk have recently added a new emoticon for soccer fans. The new soccer ball emoticon could be use by typing (goal) on your Plurks!

I don't know if what does the (bzzz) emoticon is(I think it resembles a baseball bat), but you can also use it to your Plurks by typing (bzzz).