Plurk, launched in 2008, is a communication medium that is meant to be a connection and balance between blogs and social networks and between instant messaging and e mails.
Plurk is a free social network that allows users to send updates, through short messages (up to 140 characters) or links. All the updates are placed in the home page in a chronological order. Users can respond and each such response opens a conversation thread.
It offers a way to share the things users do, the way they feel and what interest them at the moment. Users can post pictures and embed videos. They are asked to attach ‘qualifiers’, or tags to their posts: love, like, hate etc. to each message, which makes the post in the third person. Plurk can be used as an alternative to chat as well.
Considered a rival to Twitter and other micro blogging services, it offers the site in over 20 languages.
Signing up and using Plurk takes a very short time, and is extremely intuitive. The User Interface is very pretty, and you can’t appreciate how great it is compared to other services until start adding more than ten active friends and see how easily you can absorb all their activity. Those who complains about Twitter’s lack of threading is surely going to enjoy the threading on Plurk.
You can look at any Plurk and immediately see how many replies it has gotten. You can see all these replies and add your own (threaded chronologically) simply by clicking on the number at the end of the thread. You can also click the Plurk page link, which takes you to the full conversation page for that message and allows you to add your reply.
Compared with the overall internet population, the site’s audience tends to be Asian and Plurk is very popular in Taiwan where it ranks 26 in site traffic.
On March 20, 2010, The Chinese police investigated an Internet threat posted on plurk.com that called for the assassination of the President of Republic of China. It was found to come out of Taiwan.
Plurk.com is visited more frequently by females; their age range is 18-24 and they are mostly college educated.
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