Screenshot of a Plurk timeline |
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| URL | Plurk.com |
|---|---|
| Commercial? | Yes |
| Type of site | Micro-blogging |
| Registration | Required |
| Available language(s) | Multilingual |
| Owner | Plurk, Inc. |
| Created by | The A-team[1] |
| Launched | May 12, 2008[2] |
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.
According to Alexa, as of December 24, 2011[update], 37.6% of Plurk's traffic comes from Taiwan.[3] Plurk is also ranked 36th in Taiwan and 1,732nd worldwide.[3]
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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 12, 2008.[4]
The etymology of the name was explained by the developers as such:[5]
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.[6] Plurks can also be "liked", as in other social sites.
Plurk also supports group conversations between friends and allows usage of emoticons together with the usual text micro-blogging.[7]
The Plurk.com developers allowed public access to the API on December 4, 2009.[8]
Due to messages being sent between users in near-realtime, many users use Plurk as an alternative to chat.
To help translate their base list of qualifiers/verbs, Plurk hosts its own translation website where users can submit translations of the Plurk user interface in other languages.[9] As of July 2008, Plurk is translated into over twenty languages.
Plurk has often been considered to be a rival to Twitter, an earlier micro-blogging service.[10][11]
In June 2008, Plurk received online attention when it was featured by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur on their net@night show in the TWiT.tv podcast network.[12][13]
On March 20, 2010, Taiwanese police investigated an Internet threat posted on plurk.com that called for the assassination of the President of the Republic of China, Ma Ying-jeou.[14]
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