I’m beautiful like me.

You mean you still aren’t on Plurk? What the hell, go sign up now! I want to hang out with you, so join me.

Plurk has a very simple user-interface. It may seem confusing at first because it is so different from other social networking sites (especially Twitter, to which it is frequently compared). The first two images below are screenshots of my profile. Yours will look similar, although much simpler at first.

At the top of your screen from your profile there is the timeline. In that timeline are plurks (yours and your friends’) - messages you share with others. Inside a plurk, others can respond and have conversations and each plurk receives its own plurk page (see the third image for a screenshot of a plurk page or click the link to see the page for yourself).

I liken Plurk to a combo of instant messaging, a forum and a mini-blog. Some people on my friends list treat plurk the way they likely treat(ed) Twitter and post what appears to be broadcasts. Some people post plurks about what they are doing, where they are going, what they are eating and so on. A few of my friends post interesting articles and intelligent, civil debate follows. I’m really enjoying it (if you couldn’t already tell!). But it would be more fun if more people I know joined in. HINTHINT. It’s a great way to stay in touch and meet new people.

It is still a relatively new social network site (having just launched in May 2008) and new sites are popping up everyday talking about Plurk. There are a few blogs I’ve discovered (and subscribed to) about it and a few of the people on my friends list are developing new plug-ins and add-ons for Plurk. Plurkpix is designed for ease in posting pics in plurks. Plurk desktop is coming. Lots of people have figured out how to use Plurk with their cell phones. It’s quite exciting.

The karma feature is a fun little feature to help you get started and keep you coming back. When you reach certain karma milestones, new features become available to you. The recent big one is the ability to modify your own profile page (from where you do 98% of your plurking) using CSS once you reach 25 karma. As you can see above, I’ve designed mine to look like my blog.

A couple of hints for newbies and would-be joiners: magik linking is enabled in plurk.

-To link to a fellow plurker, simply type the @ symbol before a user or display name with no space. For example, if you wanted to link to my profile in a plurk, type @tata in the plurk.

-To link to an outside website, type the URL of the site followed by the text you want to show in parantheses. For example, if you wanted to link to my blog in a plurk type http://tatasmagik.blogspot.com (tata’s blog). You need a space between the URL and the URL text here.

-To post thumbnails of images, copy and paste the URL of the image ending with .jpg or .gif inside a plurk. However, if the image is hosted a Flickr, copy the URL from the address bar. This is also true of emoticons! No need to wait for higher karma.

-I am adding smilies to a Photobucket account for my fellow plurkers to use.

I hope to see you on Plurk soon!