Plurkdev

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 !