You might already familiar with the way you edit text in your plurk but you don’t know we’ve added a few more enhancements to it.
Here’s a Plurk cheat sheet you might like it.
Plus, for your information, do you know Plurk has a hidden secret “Konami” code?
Try to move your mouse cursor focus on your timeline, press these keys consecutively:
Enjoy it and happy Plurking!
Folks, just a quick update from your Plurk proprietors on what’s been happening over at Plurk from an HR and recruitment perspective.
Early in 2011, Plurk officially opened its doors on a new Taipei headquartered office! Given the majority of our userbase lives in Asia, we just couldnt ignore how important it was for us to have a home base in this part of the world and this is the first in hopefully a much broader build out plan with offices in other key Asian countries.
We now have half a dozen great people working out of Taiwan, and a number of other vital team members located in other parts of Europe, North America and Asia, respectively. In recent months, we’ve welcomed new faces to the team, seen old but familiar faces shift to take on different roles and still continue to search for fresh talent to help us grow.
Our motivations have always been to try to put together a diverse team of people with unique cultural perspectives and insights irrespective of geography, and we plan to continue this directive going forward. We’re very excited to also start exploring opportunities in other emerging markets like the Middle East, Latin/South America and Africa where we think our rich and innovative communication platform can help users communicate more freely with others around them in a less utilitarian, but much more expressive and personal way. That’s what it all boils down to — humanizing communication and helping people extend their real life social interactions in a way that enrichens their lives, without restrictions or overly aggressive corporate interference and loss of personal freedoms and privacy.
So who are we hiring at the moment? Well, the easiest way to find out is to check out our Jobs page for a list of the latest openings at Plurk. Plurk runs predominantly on a python, javascript and mysql stack so if you have these skills, we’d certainly love to hear from you. Also, if you are passionate about mobile app development, social games, social commerce (like group buying services or classified services), location-based services and next generation photo/video sharing applications, then we certainly want to talk to you. That said, our most pressing requirements on the technical side are as follows:
1) MySql/NoSQL & large data set oriented developer with a lot of experience. Someone who cares about the next generation of large scale, always on, mission critical real-time applications, and what it takes to scale them to much greater heights. This should be someone interested in innovative approaches on the database and nosql side (redis, tokyo tyrant, cassandra, our very own lightcloud, etc), good experience with various cloud based services (Amazon AWS), and strong underpinnings in development (in a predominantly python, javascript and mysql environment), operations, and data management.
2) Our other critical requirement is a hard working and skilled JavaScript developer (ideally with strong python development experience as well) with passion for UX/UI/Design/Usability and other areas that concern user engagement and user experience. Someone with a good eye for detail but who is also pragmatic enough to back up their approach and tweaks with data. We continually strive to improve plurk in a Kaizen type of way, and finding a great hacker here who is committed to making minor tweaks here and there that incrementally make Plurk the best social networking experience on the web is what we’re after.
Ultimately, we want to find people that are also passionate about tackling the bleeding edge of mobile, location and social with a great team of equally dedicated people from all around the world. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are at the moment; Plurk has offices in Toronto, Warsaw, and Taipei, and we encourage new hires to get exposure and interface directly with other teammates, but if you value our goals and think you want to really improve the way people connect with each other in a way that is different than anything else out there on the web, we would love to hear from you! All you need to do is drop us a quick note with your cv/resume, a linkedin profile/link to a blog/github repo/open source contributions if you have these things, and let us know of anything else you think that makes you an ideal candidate for consideration on our team to jobs@plurk.com and we’ll get back to you to follow up!
An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a numerical identifier label assigned to a device such as a computer or smartphone. With this number, the device is able to communicate with other devices within the same network or in other participating networks.
There are two versions of the Internet Protocol today. IP version 4 (IPv4), and IP version 6 (IPv6). IPv4 is currently used by most network devices. Unfortunately, IPv4 is limited to approximately 4.3 billion total distinct addresses and the world is running low on IPv4 addresses. While this number may seem large, consider this:
There are close to 7 billion people on earth. If we wanted to give each person a unique IP address, we wouldn’t be able to give 1/3 of the world an IP address.
Some of the factors contributing to IPv4′s rapid exhaustion are the increased number and use of mobile devices, an increasing number of Internet users, and always on broadband Internet access connections.
At today’s rapid IPv4 consumption rate, it is expected that the entire IPv4 address space would be exhausted by the end of 2011. This means that no additional devices will be able to be added to the Internet in general without ‘tricks’, ‘hacks’ or special workarounds like network address translation.
The next generation Internet Protocol, IPv6, is a more robust addressing system that allows for far more IP addresses. It would be possible to have 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 or in plain English, approximately 340 undecillion IPv6 addresses! (Yes, we’ve never heard of undecillion either, but trust us, it’s a very very very very very very …you get the point… big number)
At Plurk, we are excited to start this transition period adopting IPv6 usage. Starting today, Plurk will be providing experimental/test access over IPv6 at http://ipv6.plurk.com/.
Plurk is also excited to participate in the World IPv6 Day. On June 8, 2011, Plurk will provide both IPv4 and IPv6 access to http://www.plurk.com/.
Finally, we wish to extend a Happy and Prosperous Chinese New Years to all of our Asian language users as we spring into the year of the rabbit! Thanks so much for making Plurk a success and we look forward to serving you with an even better experience in the coming year.
My name’s Josh Lawrence and I’ve been a Plurk addict for a little over two years now (http://www.plurk.com/joshlawrence). One of the most fun things that’s happened to me on Plurk is getting crazy song ideas from my Plurk friends. I have a music podcast (Mozomedia Music’s Two Song Shot), one feature of which is inviting people to request custom-made songs. A listener can submit a song title and what they’d like the song to sound like, and I and/or my musical collaborator Karl Eifrig may make their request into a song for the next podcast. Several times I’ve asked my plurk buddies if they had any requests for custom-made songs. They have not disappointed!
For instance, Mr San from New Zealand recently requested a song titled “Mr San’s World Tour” to commemorate his upcoming vacation, which has stops literally all around the world (actually, at the time I’m writing this, that trip’s no longer upcoming – it has begun!). Using his vacation itinerary, I (performing as JJ Sonick) made this song:
http://www.archive.org/download/MrSansWorldTour/JJ_Sonick-Mr_Sans_World_Tour.mp3
Kai Balbin from Orange County, CA requested a song called “Diwata” (Filipino for ‘goddess’ or ‘fairy’), suggesting the song sound like “maybe sigur ros meet radiohead meet the album leaf/roots of orchis.”
http://www.archive.org/download/Diwata/JJ_Sonick-Diwata.mp3
Vinita requested a song in Bollywood / Bhangra style that had to include the dentist-visit-related lyrics “I wore cool shades”, “There’s protein in my saliva”, and “My teeth were media-blasted”. Quite a challenge! It became “Sanjay’s Dentist Appointment”:
http://www.archive.org/download/SanjaysDentistAppointment/JJ_Sonick-Sanjays_Dentist_Appointment.mp3
Steve Dobkins from Fort Worth, Texas requested a song called “I Drug My Rope Through the Cow Pasture”, saying “feel free to improvise” for the genre. We couldn’t resist country-ing it up (we also changed the conjugation to “Dragging”, which Steve forgave us for).
http://www.archive.org/download/DraggingMyRopeThroughTheCowPasture/New_Old_Men-Dragging_My_Rope.mp3
Joanne Fong (http://www.plurk.com/engnr_chik) from San Francisco, CA challenged us to make a song based on this photo. Here’s the result – a tale of a dubiously heroic canine vs. a possessed… well, you’ll just have to listen to “Dog Saves the Day” by The New Old Men:
http://www.archive.org/download/DogSavesTheDaySong/New_Old_Men-Dog_Saves_the_Day.mp3
Breanne Kato from California (who sadly doesn’t plurk anymore – come back, Breanne!) requested a reggae number about Pete, her “algae-eating aquarium fish” who “couldn’t care less that Skeletor the goldfish [his previous aquarium roommate] is dead.” Karl Eifrig (whom I collaborate with as The New Old Men) obliged:
And Panchitah from Los Angeles, CA asked for a tribute to a Plurk error message we used to occasionally see a while back – the dreaded “an unknown error has occurred” showing in the timeline. Fortunately, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that error! An 8-bit Apple II computer was used to make this one.
http://www.archive.org/download/UnknownErrorsAreHappening/Unknown_Errors_are_Happening.mp3
I should mention that while some of my plurk friends are people I already knew in the “real world”, all of the people above I became friends with through Plurk. It’s because of Plurk that I know these fun people and that these songs exist. Thanks, Plurk!
Written by Josh Lawrence from California. He currently plurks at http://plurk.com/joshlawrence
Once upon a time, there was a headless dog. Now, this headless dog hated the holidays, because he could not smell the wonderful smells that everyone else could, could not enjoy the wonderful holiday TV, and could not even sing/bark Christmas carols with his comrades. One year, the one-eyed monster thought she could cheer up the headless dog by turning herself into a bouncy ball for him, but to no avail. The headless dog wanted desperately to play with the one-eyed monster, but games he had enjoyed before were now totally void. How was he supposed to play Fetch with no mouth?
It wasn’t always like this. Before he was headless, he was known to be a complete gentleman, giving out dancing bananas like candy and using qualifiers like they were going out of style. However, he had never recovered from losing his head. “Don’t go losing your head now,” people used to say to him. Since that had happened, that had been replaced with “At least you’re still alive! Look at that delicious and moist cake!” For some reason, people thought that cake was an appropriate substitute for losing a head.
Year upon year, the headless dog grew more and more depressed. “Bah, Plurkbug!” he was known to mutter around the holiday season. The headless dog enjoyed causing havoc on Plurk, causing irregular karma drops, random periods of downtime and being mean to the other Plurk mascots. He stood on the tail of the lizard, convinced the cat to gobble up the many-eyed fish, and kicked darts at the winged creature.
“What’s wrong with him?” Plurkers whispered to each other before the headless dog flew into a fit of rage and caused another bout of downtime.
This Christmas Eve, the headless dog was sitting in his kennel, plotting how to ruin Christmas for every plurker, when something strange happened – for a second, he thought he had seen the face of his creator, Alvin, reflected in his water bowl.
The headless dog shook himself. It was getting late, and he must’ve been tired.
However, a few hours later, there was a great commotion outside his kennel. The Great Angel Alvin appeared in front of the headless dog’s kennel and proclaimed, “Lo and behold! I am the Great Angel Alvin, Master and Creator to all Plurk creatures worldwide…” The headless dog gave a large sniff of disgust. This dude makes him headless, but he still gets to be an angel. How was that fair? Ignoring him, The Great Angel Alvin continued, “Tonight, you will be haunted by three spirits; the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Ghost of Christmas Present, and the Ghost of Christmas Future. It is the only way you will escape my fate – being shocked mercilessly by Rammi’s taser.” And without any further explanation, he disappeared.
“Bah, Plurk -” the headless dog attempted to say, but could only get out the first syllable. There was nothing left to do now but wait.
When the headless dog woke again, he saw the Great Angel Janet motioning him to get up. Begrudgingly, he followed her. In an instant, he saw what his life was like before he wasn’t headless, his first encounter with a dancing banana, and most importantly, an ostrich Plurk mascot he’d fallen in love with. Everything was going well until he was made headless, and could only wallow in his own-self pity. He could only watch as he saw her say for the second time, “I can’t be a Plurk mascot any more,” she had told him. “Your only thoughts are revenge on those you believe have wronged you.” And she left him. “Take me away from this place!” The headless dog screamed, and woke up in a cold sweat. He wondered what Plurk staff member the next spirit would be.
But it wasn’t a Plurk staff member who next appeared to him. It was a terrifying amalgamation of discarded Plurk creatures over the years. This creature took him into the homes of the other Plurk mascots, who were all sharing Christmas gifts. “Bah, Plurkbug,” the headless dog muttered.
“Oh, if only the headless dog could be with us now,” said the lizard. “What, so he can throw more darts at my head?” sniggered the winged creature, and they all laughed at him.
“Imbeciles! They wouldn’t dare to do that to my face! Oh, but they look so happy together!” cried the headless dog, before being brought back to his kennel once more.
The headless dog was now dreading what the last spirit had in store for him. He didn’t want to see what his actions had done to those around him. Nevertheless, the Ghost of Christmas Future, also known as Kan, appeared. The Ghost did not speak, but expressed itself in a variety of emoticons. And as he stretched out his cold dark hand towards the headless dog, all the headless dog could feel was darkness.
Kan had brought him to a Christmas feast, where many plurkers were waiting for the main course to be served. The headless dog could only watch as an all too familiar body came into view. “Hey, at least we won’t have to worry about downtime so much now!” A Plurker reached for the headless dog’s leg and bit into it. “Mmm, he tastes better dead than he did alive…” another gave a sigh of delight. Soon, the whole table was full of murmurs and appreciation for the headless dog’s carcass.
“Is this what will be? Or is it only what may be?” the headless dog begged Kan. But Kan being Kan, gave no response, and the headless dog was left crying at his water bowl.
“I will change!” the headless dog resolved to himself. “I will not forget the lessons these spirits have taught me. I refuse to be a Christmas meat.”
When Christmas morning hit, the headless dog gave the lizard a new tail, offered the cat and fish some catnip and fish food, and apologised to the winged creature. Everyone was astonished to see the transformation in him. But what could he give to the plurkers to repent for his past sins?
“I shall give them unlimited karma, so that they are no longer limited at 100,” he proclaimed with pride.
And so, from that day forward, the headless dog became known as a dog who was proud to be headless, and a dog who kept Christmas well. Plurkers and Plurk mascots lived in complete, blissful harmony… Forever.
Over the years we have experimented with different features and product enhancements on Plurk. Some worked pretty well. Some didn’t. IM integration and Plurk Lottery didn’t.
We measure the success of our features by looking at different metrics but they mainly come down to user engagement (how many people are using it? how often do they use it? Are they happy with the feature?) and extensibility (is it hard to maintain? does its existence align with the core purpose of what we are trying to achieve in near future?).
Regrettably, Plurk Lottery and Instant Messaging perform poorly on these metrics. As a result, we will be retiring them come this Friday. As we plan to release more interesting features over the next coming months, the removal of these features will hopefully introduce more breathing space for the newcomers to shine without overcrowding existing user interface.
We apologize if this causes any inconvenience for our users.
It’s been a while since we last updated our blog. We thought some of you might be interested to know more about what we have been up to, our grand plan for the future and when we are going to give out free karma points (never!)
Thanks to you, Plurk has grown steadily ever since it launched two years ago. Having spent zero money on marketing, we greatly appreciate the power of word of mouth our passionate users have given out. Watching our traffic grow makes old farts like us giggle happily. Every time. As the viral effect grows, it is important we work hard to make sure the site is up and as responsive as always. For that we want to apologize if you have enjoyed less than satisfactory experience lately. It will get better, trust us.
Here are some self-absorbing charts you didn’t ask for.
Simultaneously, we have also been working on some cool stuff which shall remain confidential for now. Christmas is still two months away.
I also want to take this opportunity to discuss one of the questions we have gotten a lot lately – how is Plurk going to make money? Some of our users are concerned about our monetization plan, or the lack of it, and worry about Plurk’s viability and survivability in this great wild world of social networking. There were even talks about a donation pledge of some sorts (awww that is so sweet!). All I can say is we are working on this and it doesn’t involve bombarding you with obtrusive ads or selling our kidneys.
We are also expanding our Asia team with these recent new hires:
Danny Lin, Managing Director, Asia Pacific
Danny comes to us with a wealth of experience and is a well-known figure within the internet startup circle in Asia with more than 20 years experience in the online space. He was one of the founding members of Google Taiwan, working as Country Lead Product Manager for both Google Taiwan & Hong Kong markets. Danny led the effort to drive and manage all Google products in the Taiwan and Hong Kong markets as well as leading several global projects and helped to boost Google’s growth by more than 40% in Taiwan and overtook major competitors in Hong Kong within just a few months.
Prior to that, he worked for 3+ years as Head of Communications Products at Yahoo! Taiwan and led a team to launch some of the most popular web products like Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Flickr, etc. His achievement on Yahoo! Messenger has became a legend amongst the global teams. He is also currently a guest lecturer for the Department of Information Management at Chinese Culture University (文化大學).
Chengda, Developer
Chengda worked for Gigamedia (Funtown) as a Manager in R&D department before joining Plurk. He has 10+ years worth of experience in internet technologies, ISP services and the casual game industry. At Gigamedia, he designed and developed a UNIX-based platform for casual games and led the design of a “micro-transaction system” to assist virtual currency transactions. He also designed a virtual reward system to support virtual item campaigns for online games. He also developed an auto-provisioning system and network management system for ADSL & Cable Modem services. In a nutshell, he builds awesome infrastructure for social gaming platform.
Victor Lin, Developer
Victor fell in love with programming in junior high school. He also fell in love with Plurk. After he submitted a patch to a project Amir was working on, we asked him to be our intern developer. He majors in software engineering. He also designed, built, and currently runs a free online radio platform web-site http://now.in. He likes to hack on open source projects when he’s not busy working with us. You may find some of his codes on his blog or Bitbucket profile.
We are always looking to fill the team with awesome hires. If you know someone, or if you are THE ONE, send us an email.
Here’s the No-Bullshit summary: Plurk traffic is going up. The Plurk team is expanding. We are aggressively hiring. We are still not profitable. We are working on our monetization offerings. We are sorry for the recent uptime performance. I still like cheesecake.
Thank you for plurking.
The above photo, by Plurking photographer Dave77459, was shot on the 23rd of June this year during the second Plurk Worlwide Sunset.
The third Plurk Worlwide Sunset will be on 23 Sep 2010 and we would be very pleased if you would join us in this event. You can join us on flickr at the Plurk Worldwide Sunset group and/or you can leave a link to your own images at Plurkfiends. On that same link, you will find a slideshow of all the images in the flickr group to-date.
The event is held around the world at sunset wherever you are – make photographs, document your experience and share it with the world. You can find your own sunset time via this handy calculator.
Have a look at the suggested links and if you think this is something that you’d like to do, we’ll be happy to welcome you to the 3rd Plurk Worldwide Sunset.
Last week, I was invited to a wedding. A three hour train ride up to Newcastle from London later, and I was able to watch Danni and John tie the knot (and be a witness! SQUEE)!
Why is this significant, I hear you bleat? Well, it’s because I met these two on Plurk some time ago, and now love both of them very dearly. Danni and John met on Second Life before Plurk existed, so they truly are an internet couple. What did we do after the wedding, the invisible voice in my head asks again? Well, we dined on pizza, drank too many alcopops (or that might have been just me), ate up the Portal-themed wedding cake, and played Rock Band, where I *ahem* “treated” the newly-married couple with an awful rendition of Still Alive. A fantastic day (but not for those who heard me sing).
Plurk friends of either Danni or John have been able to watch their relationship blossom from the very first plurks about it (and all the cuteness in between), to the announcement of their engagement and subsequent marriage on here.
I thank Plurk for introducing me to them, and wish them many, many years of purple-tinted happiness.
I was at my friends house that time when I knew about Plurk. I was curious about it, but at first I did not really get how that (Plurk) website works. Because it was really different. Maintaning a Karma and getting Karma points, getting to scroll it horizontally. Then finally I made an account. At first I was not really into it, then I started plurking more. Even though at that time I only have at least less than 10 friends. And there was only one who was responding from plurks.
One thing I love about Plurk is the emoticons. Especially the banana emoticon. I love it! It’s so cute 
Many things happened because of Plurk. Well, it really helped a lot to get close to my crush Really it did. It was one of the way I talk to him. Haha. Now, yeah we’re doing OKAY 
. But not all are good ones. My two friends got into a fight because of their conversation at their Plurks. It was sort of misunderstanding.
Now, it would be almost a year I’m using Plurk. I’m happy having these social website. I won’t get tired of using it.
Thanks. Keep it up Plurk
written by Jamie Matienzo, 17, from Pasig, Philippines. http://www.plurk.com/akosijamiehaha