Plurk Update: the quiet achiever

Plurk is continuing to grow, even at a time many first adopters have written it off. Regular Plurk users are noticing that the mix on Plurk is very much different to what you see on services such as Twitter. Darren Rowse noted during the week that “one of the things that I love about plurk is that the top user is using it to talk about knitting – no web 2.0 cool crowd but real people.” While I don’t believe that first adopters aren’t real people, the quote does sum up the mix on Plurk really well: the Plurk crowd is far more mainstream then the mix you see on other services.

Here’s some of the latest Plurk related tools and news since our last big Plurk update late June.

Plurkair still going strong

I typed Plurkair into Google the other day and it returned over 9,000 results, which is completely insane. Despite the unofficial Plurk API launching, I haven’t seen an API based replacement yet. If you’re finding the Plurk time line a barrier to entry, and would prefer a Twitter style interface, head on over to the Plurkair post here, and download it. A new version is being worked on.

SocialThing Supports Plurk

FriendFeed style service SocialThing has added support for Plurk, while FriendFeed itself is dragging the chain. SocialThing is embracing a lot of two way interaction at the moment so it’s worth a look, and I need to revisit it shortly myself.

Plurk Updater for WordPress

You can now update your Plurk account with your latest posts from WordPress with this WordPress plugin. My suggestion, as with the Twitter plugin, is that if you are writing a lot of posts, that you think twice about spamming people with links as it’s an quick path to losing followers.

State of the Web

State of the Web created the image above, that sums up how many Plurk users are feeling about the Twitter/ Plurk split at the moment. More here.

Plurk Widgets

Get your own Plurk Karma widgets or follower widgets here and here. The one thing that annoys me with Plurk is Karma, mostly because I don’t have a lot. I gave out the direct link to my profile when I first started writing about Plurk, and despite having introduced a pile of people to the service, I’m showing none introduced and therefore have a lower karma score than if I’d handed out the special link.

Plurk Greasemonkey Scripts

The full list here, but some highlights: Plurk Translator, Plurk Time Machine, Plurk Rich Edit and more.

Positive Press

Two posts of note: InsideCRM says “Plurk: A Welcoming Microblogging Community” and Smart Boy: “Why Plurk Rules The Micro-Blogging Universe.” Sucomments also has a solid three part series on using Plurk that starts here.

Plurk by the numbers

Things are looking good, particularly with Compete

You can also sign up, or follow me on Plurk by clicking here.