Have you used plurk to do more than chit, chat, brag and bemoan? Well Sunday night I gave plurk a try as a group fun platform.

     Lots of folks make jokes or puns, but I think we’ve missed out on a use.  Plurk posts and comments act the same as a thread in forums.  So I figured why not play with that.

     My first few trials were with numbers. Here’s my first number sequence, and here’s my second.  Those both got a response, so I decided to give something else a try.  How about Bible  books.

     Bible books should be fairly easy but it took a while to take off. Here’s the Bible thread. At the time of this writing, it left off at 2nd Chronicles. Thanks Phil Crissman for jumping in.

     The final fun game is still ongoing and just about halfway there. Name 200 cities with no repeats. Feel free to bzzt folks that mess up.

     Are you getting a good sense of what I’m going for?  I see plurk as a chance to do a lot of free form games.  I’m thinking beyond simple name and number games.  There’s potential to do games requiring links to make it work.

     What about you? Any plurk game ideas?  Have you heard of fizzbuzz? I’m thinking that one is on the list for sure.

d3bruts1d says Plurk is the World of Warcraft of micro-blogging.

Cuter than the Twitter whale?

Plurk, it’s all the buzz. What have you heard? How it’s the cool new chat tool? How it’s got a neat creature? Or how Karma rules the roost? But have you heard about the chat parser?

Parser? Yes, it’s what runs over and processes the words you type in your plurk or comment. It turns your text into rich goodness, and you didn’t even know it. Let’s look at some of the obvious ones.

**this** becomes **this**

*this* becomes *this*

__this__ becomes this

Pretty nifty huh? Well there’s a few more tricks in there. The next two are nifty and less obvious.

In the chat window to create a plurk, there are several options, such as says, and wishes. There is also freestyle. The last allows you to type any text. What happens if you type says or wishes though? You get the plurk version just as if you’d selected it.

The next one is about linking someone’s name. If you want to link tojosan for example, simply putting an @ in front does the trick.

tojosan with an @ at front becomes tojosan. The @ disappears.

Did all of that overwhelm you? Well here’s a final trick for sharing URLs without having that overly long string in there. It’s another markup trick. Here we go.

URL[space](link text)

ex http://amazon.com (Amazon – The online store) becomes Amazon – The online store

ex http://plurk.com (Plurk – your life on the line) becomes Plurk – your life on the line

The key is to type out the URL then a space, followed by a (, then the link text you want, then close with a ). Go ahead, try a few. It’s easy once you see it.

As a shortcut, this also works www.plurk.com (The Plurk) becomes The Plurk.

So there you have it, a bag of Plurk goodness to play with in your chats. Go forth and chat with gusto. Come back and share your tips and tricks with the rest of us.

Happy plurking!

Plurk.

Plurk is a made up word and a fantasy creature. Plurk is more; it’s the latest chat and conversation tool on the market, and plurky just about describes it.

Plurk takes a whole new spin on on chat though as you can see. Chat isn’t just streaming up the window as with Twitter, Pownce or IM. The flow is left to right. Like little boats of conversation floating down the river, the watchful eye of the plurk beast overseeing it.

Already you can imagine it takes a bit of getting used to, but now check out the chat popup.

Each conversation box opens up, and a complete thread can take place there. The whole of that conversation is contained inside that box. The neatest thing is it’s a live update box. As folks comment back in it, it updates while you watch.

This feature is especially interesting when the plurk message is a private one or to a clique. Then it’s not even visible except to those invited into it. The box becomes your own private chat room.

Karma! Just one of the interesting features of plurk is Karma. You, me, the guy with the rat fetish, we all earn karma. Let me just say, the karma wars are on.

Karma is earned through some obvious activities. Adding friends, inviting people, and posting messages all seem to have a positive affect on your karma. You can’t always tell though, as karma points are only updated about twice each day. The notes are fuzzy on when updates occur.

So what’s the point of karma? Well unlike regular social networks, such as Twitter, or Facebook, plurk doesn’t open all of its features to new members. As your karma increases, more features, really customizations, become available.

Customizations include changing your backgrounds, cool chat icons, including dancing bananas, picking out your version of the plurk creature, and naming your plurk page. Those are most of the things that get unlocked, and it seems obvious there are more to be found.

The whole unlocking thing, coupled with the ever moving stream of messages, give plurk a game like feel. At first this is fun and appealing to almost everyone it seems. The problem is that karma updates so slowly that for most folks, they are unable to unlock anything until their second day on plurk, and even then just one or two items.

The other downside to making it so game like is that the aggressive gaming of the system is already occurring. You’ll see folks with several hundred friends and thousands of messages sent. You’ll see threads of conversation going into the hundreds of follow on comments. People are hunting down karma like it was the next big thing. Remind you of WoW?

So the game like feel may not be for everyone, but overall plurk is an interesting take on conversation online. I find it is a lot more interactive than Twitter or Pownce, and with the built in chat features, more fun to actually use.

I’ll be putting a follow up post together just about the chat text and link features. Feel free to share your best and favorite ones here, as well as your take on using plurk. Please, jump in and share, and post your plurk me link.

Plurk me?