Plurkdev

By now, if you haven’t came across Plurl.me, well …. where have you been ?

Just to recap, Plurl.me is a URL Shortening service, similar to Tinyurl.com.  The different is that, with Plurl.me, you can post the resulting shortened URL to Plurk right from the site.

So far so good, the only downside was that, previously if you want to use the service, you need to copy the original url and then go to Plurl.me website, paste the url into the form and take it from there.

Until Now !

Now, with the help of the Plurlet below, you can use the service right from your browser, no need to do copy and paste no more.

Just click and drag the Plurl This! link below to your Bookmark Toolbar, and done !  Whenever you want to share any url of a website that you are happened to be looking at, just click on the Plurlet, and you can Plurk the short url version from the popup that appears.

Try it now, with this post for example

Plurl This!

If you come across any problem while you are using this Plurlet, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

Cheers.  Keep Plurking !

For a few months now we’ve been waiting for the two Plurk iPhone Apps.  The first one is, I believe, created by Ryan Lim owner of Plurk Karma Trend and the creator of the first unofficial Plurk API (Ryan, please CMIIW).  The second iPhone App is called iPlurk (what a surprise!).  I am not sure who’s making this one, there is no link to the developer’s website, or an About page in the website.  It does say though that the copyright belongs to AjaxLife Development, but there is no link or explanation of who they are.

Surprisingly, even though Ryan’s app was submitted to AppStore on September 2008, much earlier than iPlurk which was submitted around January 2009, iPlurk seems to be hitting AppStore first.  I emailed Ryan, asking about this earlier, let’s see what’s his opinion on this matter.

Anyway, as you’ve probably guessed, I was pretty excited when I heard that iPlurk was up on AppStore, I opened my AppStore, searched iPlurk, and there it was.  But imagine my horror when I saw the ‘price tag’ !  You have to fork $1.99 to get this app !  A little bit ’steep’ for this kind of app, considering that other similar apps (Twitter’s for example) are free.

But as I really wanted to try it, I said to myself that it would be a good investment, so I touched the button and bought it.  As usual, iPhone immediately downloaded and installed that app.

And there it was, installed on my iPhone Home Page.  Opening the app, I was greeted with the login page.

Putting in my username and password, I was taken to the main page:

It took a while to load all the new Plurks, though I blamed this more on the lack of Plurk Official API, rather than the app itself.
There is nothing special on the look and feel of the User Interface in general, it’s just like any other basic iPhone Apps out there.  At the top you can see the Toolbar with 3 buttons, each will give you access to All New Plurks, Unread Plurks, and Private Plurks.  Another button on the top-right corner is for opening the Write New Plurk page.  No Refresh button though.  It turned out that the refresh is automatic, which is not a bad thing, again, considering that we still don’t have a proper Plurk API yet, we really don’t want to give the Plurk folks a heart-attack.  Luckily, you can change the poll-interval via the iPlurk Setting.

The Plurk Timeline, some of you might feel relieved, is a Horizontal scrolling one Each row shows the user’s avatar, the message, and depending on your setting, it will show you an embedded emoticons.  Your shared picture or video will just be showed as link.  It will also have the date and time when the Plurk was created, how many responses it has and how many of these responses are unread.
Tapping on a Plurk will take you to the Response page where you can read all responses for that particular Plurk.

On top right corner of this Plurk Responses page, you can find the Reply button.  Tapping this button will open the Reply Page:

Tapping on the ‘>’ will give you the list of Qualifiers (all in English at the moment).

While tapping on the ‘empty field’ below the username will give you the usual virtual keyboard for you to write.
You can see also that there is an Upload Photo button, this will allow you to Plurk your photo, either directly from your iPhone camera, or from the list on your Photo Roll.

Here is an example when I tried to upload my photo when I was creating a new Plurk (same interface as replying):

It seems that iPlurk uses proprietary service to shorten the url (I am not sure where the file itself is uploaded to). Tapping on the send button brought me back to the main page where I could see the Plurk I had just created with the link to the photo I uploaded.  Only when I went to the Responses page that I could see the photo embedded.

Speaking about links, you can tap on any link and the url will be loaded in the so-called in-built browser.  If you’ve been playing around with other iPhone app that has similar functionality, you would understand what this is.  Basically it’s like a toned down Safari Browser, without the url bar.

If the in-built browser is not enough for you, you can always invoke the ‘real’ Safari by tapping on that button with bulls-eye icon.

Back on the main page, if you tap on the Unread button, you will be taken to the page where you can view your unread plurks, and just like the web counterpart, you can Mark All as Read by tapping on the button on the top right hand corner and choose Mark All As Read button from the slide up pane.

Another functionality that quite useful is, when you tap on the Avatar icon, iPlurk will show you Plurks from that User:

Annoyingly, you can’t tap on your own avatar to get your own Plurks ! WTH !

Finally, you can set some settings:

The Verdict

This version of iPlurk, for me, is ‘functional’ at best.  Sure, it has all the basic functionalities, i.e. Showing Timeline, Responses, Replying, Creating New Plurk with Qualifier, and even uploading Photo.  Let say, it’s a little bit less tedious than Plurk Mobile.  But with some other ‘crucial’ functionalities are still missing, namely the ability to see your ‘own’ plurks and plurks you’ve been responded to, as well as private plurking and multi-languange qualifiers, I just can not justify the 2 bucks I had to pay for it.

My advise, give it a try only if you really … really desperate or if you have absolutely had enough with Plurk Mobile :)  But other than that, I would stick with Plurk mobile for a while longer, or better still, create a better one.

Now, Plurk Team, can we please have that API please !?

Keep Plurking !

My fellow Plurkers, as I read Bloggeries‘ blog post today entitled ‘Plurk not Growing? Why?’, a sudden pang of guilt came to my heart.  Why? Because admittedly I’ve been neglecting Plurk for quite some times now.  I even have not touched Plurkerati and Plurl.me codes for weeks, despite that they desperately need looking after, or added more features, etc.  I neglected them in favour for my new Blogs (Gangsenggol and TooGeekToBeTrue),  and for Twitter.

It’s not that I don’t like it anymore, no, I loved Plurk the first time (the two web-apps above are the fruit of this), and I still do.  The reasons are really simple, Time and Attention!  You see, I’m taking these, let say,  Social Interactions very seriously.  This was why I chose Plurk; it promotes conversations in a more logical and meaningful sense (I know many non-Plurk users would disagree with me).  But as I tried to broaden my Social nets, by concentrating on new blogs and recently on Twitter, it becomes apparent to me that it is impossible to keep tag on ALL my social apps (plus emails) AND still having a meaningful (and sane) conversations with all my friends.  It’s hard.  I had to reduce my attention to only a few conversation at any one time, otherwise I will have no time for other things (real life for one).  And unfortunately, this time, Plurk has been taking a back-bencher for a while, so that I could concentrate on other things.

There are other things that I would like to say about Plurk though, inline with what Bloggeries has said in his post.  I have to say, I’m a bit dissapointed with the A-Team (the Plurk develoment team).  For example, have a look at their blog, check when was the last time they write on there, October the 7th! C’mon, that’s like more than 2 months now.  I would expect that they would’ve said some Christmas or Happy New Year Greetings, or something like that, but nothing.  Guys, are you still alive ?

And then there is this old thing called API!  Back then they didn’t want to release an official API with reason that they were prioritising on stability first.  Great !  That’s the most sensible thing I’ve ever heard in a long time.  I respected and supported that.  Hence I built my own API, which I used for the two apps I have.

The problem is, until now, 8 months later, I still don’t see any sign of them releasing the API.  I really believe that this is the biggest stumbling-block Plurk currently has, that prevent it to grow !  Just look at Twitter, thanks to its API, people build apps, tools, services on top of it almost daily.  The advantage and impact of having Desktop App alone is massive!  What is the biggest turn-off for people who don’t like Plurk, it’s the User Interface, the ‘weird’ side-scrolling timeline.  A Desktop App with a more conventional top-down design will sort this out straight-away.  And if at this point you are going to point me to the Plurk Mobile, you better stop right there :)  Sure it’s usable (I used it very often), but a fully functional Desktop App will make so much different (think Twhirl or TweetDeck for Twitter).  Actually, one Plurker, Keith, was supposed to build a Plurk Desktop App, which has excited us, for a while.  But a quick look at the development blog tells you that the development is still 54% in completion, and Keith himself doesn’t seem to post in Plurk since September

I was supposed to write just a simple paragraph, but it seems that it has turned to be a small rant

So, my plea for the Plurk Team, please let us know that you are alive, and doing something, anything.  Please release the API, so that the developers can build more cool stuff (more easily).  If what this statistics from compete.com shows even half the story, then you guys are already loosing. 

Guys, get your act together, and quick!  I will wait, but please don’t take to long

Keep Plurking !

Today Plurk was not quite stable, slow and often time-out quite a lot, though not exactly ‘Fail-Whale’.

Usually that means the Plurk Team is doing some maintenance work, or even releasing something new.  So, when the service was eventually back to normal, I started to look for any changes that might had been done.

I looked and looked and couldn’t find anything, until one Plurk Friend pointed me out (cheers mate!). Obviously I didn’t look hard enough.

Meet The A Team

Keep Plurking !

I refreshed my Plurk Page just now, and suddenly I heard ‘ding … ding’ at an interval period.  I was a little bit annoyed at first because I though it was one of those banner ads that makes annoying noises.  So I looked and looked at my Firefox opened tabs.  Finally I glanced over my Plurk ‘New Plurk/New Response’ link, and that’s when I saw this

Cool ! Though, I’m not sure if I want to hear that ‘ding … ding’ sound the whole day

PS: You can, of course, turn it off, as you can see in the screenshot.

Happy Plurking!

To whom it may concern
I just spotted that ‘TimeLine/addPlurk’ call now needs one more additional parameter.
This parameter is ‘uid’, and the value is, as expected, the user_id of the Plurk User that is posting the Plurk.

HTH !
Keep Plurking

After doing Ranking by Score the other day, I set myself back to work on Plurker Stats by Location, which I actually started earlier but had to abandone in favour to the Ranking.

As with others Top 100 Stats, i.e. by Score, Karma, Friends, Fans, Plurks and Responses; you can access the link from the Sidebar on the Stats Page.

Clicking on the ‘by Location’ link will take you to the Stats/Location Page.  Alternatively you can go directly to the page via the following address: http://plurkerati.com/stats/location.

To get the list, you must at least specify both Country and Filter by fields.  If you drop-down the Country combo-box, you will notice all sort of weird country’s name that you would not have heard before, don’t fret, we are not inventing new imaginary countries here :)  The source of the list is actually coming from the Location the each of Plurk User fills in in their Profile

The Filter by combo-box will filter the list on the following criteria:

• Karma
• Friends
• Fans
• Plurks
• Responses
• Score

Optionally, you can specify the State/Region and/or City.  Clicking on the Search button will start the search process.

Here is an example of the Result Page:

The result page has titles that will tell you, which filter you were running, e.g. Karma, Friends, Score, etc and the Location that you are specifying, e.b. Great Britain UK >> London, etc.

In addition, there is a permalink link (which contains a direct link to the particular result page), just in case you want to bookmark, or share the result to the world.

As always, any feedbacks or suggestions are welcome.

Keep Plurking !

No, it’s not the next winning number for the Lottery, although if you would try and win it, please remember me
If you visit Plurkerati regularly, especially on the Stats section, you would notice that, often some of the items on the list in there shows some strange sequence of numbers. For example, you would see that some of the users would have 4294967295 of friends, or the others would have 2147483647 number of Plurks.  Obviously this can’t be true, and a quick look to their individual Profile Page would prove this, as a matter of fact, for each of the category that shows this number, the Profile page will shows 0 (zero).

So the next thing on my mind was that I must’ve been done something wrong with my code, but another quick check on the data that I received from Plurk, proved that it was clearly not a bug on my code, Plurk put these number on their data, and my code just merely showing what it was receiving.

Then came the curiosity, what are these numbers ? What does it represent ? and why Plurk deliberately put this in their data (because they could’ve just put 0) ?

The answer for the first two questions are so simple that I as a programmer should be ashamed of myself for not knowing it.  The two numbers represent the ‘biggest’ number you can have for an Integer in a 32 bits environment.

2^32 = 4294967295, this one is for ‘unsigned’ Integer (positive number only),  and for the ’signed’ Integer (negative and positive), the above number is divided by two, which gives 2147483647 !

As for the answer for the third question, I’m not sure.  My speculation is that, if one has just registered to Plurk as a new member, Plurk back-end code will assign this number to the Profile.  If you have any other explanation, please do share with us

And that concludes our Computer Science 101 for today

‘May the Plurk be with you’

 

Let’s face it, people like rankings! Ever since we were at school, we always love to see how well we do on certain things, in relation to our peers; be it at Maths, or Sports or Music, etc.  And again, when we got older and entered the 9 to 6 institution, we like to see ourselves on the top rank of the pecking order.

It all has anything to do with us being human, not only that we want to be the best, but maybe more importantly we want ‘others’ to recognize that we ‘are’ the best.

Then came Social Networking (SocNet), and suddenly it’s like school all over again.  Every SocNet site has Top Ranking List, in every possible categories, accompanying it; and not just one but many.

Plurk doesn’t differ, as soon as it went live, Karma Trend started to track Plurkers’ Karma and presents the Journey to Enlightenment in a nice graphical way.

Another site ranks Plurkers from different category, for example this one is by Location.

Even Plurk’s own Homepage is featuring Top 10 Plurkers by Karma.

Finally, other websites provide Top Ranking List and statistics for all sort of different categories, including by Karma, Friends, Fans, Plurks and Responses. Plurkmania and Plurkerati are the only two websites I know that provide such features.

Despite all the fun we could have by watching these websites, they are not without downsides.

The problem with these Top Lists are that on each of categories they tend to measure rank by only one variable, e.g. Karma only, Friends only.  In Plurks’s case (or in SocNets in general), this kind of measurement can give us a false impression of what is really a Top List.

Let’s take example of Top Plurkers by Fans. If you check the top 10 list, you will see the same person in this list would occupy the same spot in the other SocNet’s list, simply because these are the so-called Web 2.0 A-Lister who has thousands of followers (groupies?).  There is no way that a regular Plurkers like you and me would make this list.

Another example is Top 10 Karma List.  As Eric Odom wrote in his blog post, this list is ‘falsely inflated’.  The thing is, the users that has already made it, made it there simply because they signed-up first.  So, unless any of them is taking a long Plurk Holiday, there is no way a user that recently signed-up will be able to catch-up.

Yet another example is the Plurks List (a list or Plurkers that Plurk the most).  Again Eric Odom
on one of his Plurk, said that Plurkerati has failed on providing Top Listing because it uses Plurk as one of the measurement.  He reckoned that this list would encourage spammers.  I agree on some extent with this as I see daily Plurkers that would do Kama-Harvesting (post anything just to get Karma up).

What we really need is a way to have a list that represent the real state of a user in the context of Plurkiverse.  I have been trying to find another type of measurement to do this, and I came up with two solutions, the first one is easier to do as we’ve already had the ingredients, the second one is a bit harder to code and it requires collaboration from other users.

Plurkerati Score/Rank

The first one was quite an obvious solution, I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it straightaway.  Consider the 5 main categories that we’ve already had, i.e. Karma, Friends, Fans, Plurks, Responses. Each Plurker will have his/her rank in each of this list category.  What if we add up all 5 ranks together to yield a score, and then based on this score we re-calculate the rank of each Plurker.  As a matter of fact I’ve done this, and the result is more balance than before. Let’s take the first Plurker that reached Plurk Nirvana, WendyKnit, if we run her username through Plurkerati Rank page, we will see the following:

And the same again for LeoLaporte (#1 by fans), Bloggeries (#2 by Friends), and Amix (#1 by Plurks):

I think the result of this new ranking algorithm may help a bit in showing the ‘truth’.  What do you think ?

Plugg This !

As for my second solution, you will have to wait for the second part of this post :)  But I think if you read get my hint, you would know what’s in my mind …

Keep Plurking !

When I found out that my Crontab job was failing an hour ago, I noticed that Plurk has changed their internal API structure, especially in this case the JSON data structure for Plurk object that is returned by the API.

Here is an example of one:

{
"lang": "en",
"qualifier": "thinks",
"plurk_id": 2062966,
"gender": 0,
"age": 21,
"country_id": 217,
"owner_id": 1885550,
"longitude": 103.7539,
"content": "plurk works better with firefox than ie..",
"city_id": null,
"karma": 41.829999999999998,
"latitude": 1.3944000000000001,
"posted": "Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:26:37 GMT",
"user": {
"display_name": "Janellee",
"uid": 1885550,
"gender": 0,
"nick_name": "janellee",
"has_profile_image": 1,
"id": 1885550
},
"id": 2062966,
"region_id": null
}
 

Now what has clearly changed is that Plurk has added a few fields, e.g.:

• city_id
• country_id
• region_id

Imagine the possibilities