P-L-U-R-K love!

It's been a good few months that I and some blogger friends are enjoying a nice (chat/updates) network here in the world wide web. Several of my closest friends have signed up and some I have eventually discovered online through PLURK. I have come across this social network when Toni shared this on her blog.


Now, let me share to you what plurk really is.
Plurk is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (otherwise known as plurks) through short messages or links, which can be up to 140 text characters in length.

Updates are then shown on the user's home page using a timeline which lists all the updates received in chronological order, and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. Users can respond to other users' updates from their timeline through the Plurk.com website, by instant messaging, or by text messaging.

Plurk was developed by and envisioned as a communication medium meant to form a balance between blogs and social networks, and between e-mail messaging and instant messaging. After months of development, Plurk was launched on May 2008.

The etymology of the name was explained by the developers as such:

* abbreviation of 'people' and 'lurk'
* portmanteau of 'play' and 'work'
* acronym of peace, love, unity, respect, and karma
* verb neologism, similar to how Google was eventually used as a verb

Features and Technology

Plurk's interface shows updates in horizontal form through a scrollable timeline written in JavaScript and updated through AJAX. Users can post new messages with optional 'qualifiers', which are one-word verbs used to represent a thought (e.g. "feels", "thinks", "loves", etc.). There are also advanced features such as sending updates only to a subset of your friends, posting updates on events earlier in the day, and sharing images, videos, and other media.

Plurk also supports group conversations between friends and allows usage of emoticons together with the usual text micro-blogging.

Plurk has often been considered to be a rival to Twitter, an earlier micro-blogging service. Read more from here.

We have been enjoying plurk and it has become an activity that requires updates to gain karma, but no responsibility of replying to the plurks, although it will be more interesting if you do.

Some of us has been addicted, and has been tagged as CPAs, for Certified Plurk Addicts. And I guess, me included.

But what's lovely here is that you get blog updates earlier and some questions may get answers, from family, gossip, news, love, travel, food, technology and plenty other stuffs.

Why not try plurk, and be involved, get to meet other bloggers and enjoy chatting with them. This is the best of plurk.

And if you already had the chance to sign up, please let me know, so I can add you up too, for karma love...Weeheee!

Enjoy!