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This past Thursday I got to be on StumpMarkus, a weekly broadcast led by Markus Allen of the Marketing Junkies. Although I was incredibly nervous, it was a lot of fun. Markus is a great host and keeps the conversation flowing. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a boring show since I’ve been listening, and I always walk away with something new and some interesting sites to check out. If you’d like to hear what I sound like when I’m nervous, here’s the link.

I guess I did okay, since Markus signed up for Plurk AND I was asked to be on Mike Corso’s Cool Site broadcast. Mike’s show starts a short while after Markus’ show ends, so I was actually on 2 shows on Thursday. Here’s the link to listen to Mike’s show.

Thanks so much for having me guys!

Although I talked a little about StumbleUpon on StumpMarkus, the majority of my talk was actually about Plurk. If you haven’t been reading for the past couple weeks, Plurk is my new favorite hangout.

During Mike’s broadcast, he asked why I hadn’t responded to a Plurk he’d sent me. You see, on Plurk, although you can use the @ symbol to link to someone’s page, there’s no way of tracking to see who has sent you messages. I had been away working on a blog post at the time, so unfortunately, I had no idea that Mike had tried to reach me.

I started thinking then that we really needed a way to know someone else has referenced us. Unfortunately, I know next to nothing about coding, so can’t write a program to do it. I do know about hacks though, tricks you can use to enhance your experience with a program or site. I love the Hacks series of books. It’s always fun to learn little tricks you can use to make things work better.

When I was told two more times over the past two days that I had missed posts directed towards me, I knew it was time for a solution.

Yesterday evening, I finally came up with an idea, after reading a post that a good friend, LindaZ, the Purpose Connector, wrote.

Whenever there are too many plurks to read, Linda sends out a note to her friends asking what she’s missed that’s important. People reshare the important plurk links with her in one post, so she has a great summary of the day’s main events.

The more I thought about her idea, the more I thought why couldn’t I adapt it?

So what I did is to create a plurk asking people to post if they are referencing me, so I’ll know to come read it. I then linked to the plurk on my user page, so it’s easy to find…and added it to my RSS reader so I can see anything new quickly.

For an example, let’s say you want to know what I’m doing for dinner tomorrow night. You plurk:

Teeg, what are your plans for dinner tomorrow?

Now, unless I’m watching the timeline right then, there’s a good chance I’ll miss that plurk. But, if you click your plurk and look in the bottom right corner, you’ll see “plurk page.”

IF you click that, it will open the plurk on it’s own page, with each remark on a line by itself. But you can also simply right click where it says “plurk page” and select “copy link location” and paste the link without having to open it first. Note: This might be worded a little different depending on which browser you use.

Now, if you come to my user page, underneath the About Me part, you’ll see “Please note @ reply links here so I’ll see them.” Click where it says “here” and it will take you to my @ reply plurk.

If you’re curious what happens on my end, once you add your @ reply as a comment, the link will be bolded in my RSS reader and will tell me how many unread replies I have. Since I check my RSS reader a few times a day, it shouldn’t be long before I see the message.

The nice thing about this is that it will work no matter how many of us use it, but it will work even better as more people start doing it. If I want to write about Tamar’s latest blog post and how much I liked it, I can go to her reply plurk and leave a message directing her to what I just wrote:

@Tamar, check out this plurk

By using this method, if someone has a reply plurk set up, I won’t have to wait until I know that they’re on to make a post I want them to see, and then hope it goes by when they’re actually looking at the screen.

So what do you think? Will this idea work until Plurk decides to add a response page? It still doesn’t answer the question of marking pages that you comment on, but I’m working on that one as well.

Cliques - The Great Idea with the Awful Name
Want to read the earlier parts? Here are the links.
Part 1 - Getting Started
Part 2 - Let’s Get Plurking
Part 3a - Emoticon Cheat Sheet

Do you remember all the groups there were in school? There were the computer geeks, the rednecks (No, not the Jeff Foxworthy type, I mean the real rednecks…the ones who fit this profile). There were the cheerleaders, of course, and the jocks…and the other jocks, who were into sports, but not THOSE sports, and there were the…

You get the idea.

Because of our school memories, cliques have a bad reputation. Having cliques automatically means that someone is left out.

Using cliques on Plurk is probably one of the biggest reasons so many people keep thinking of it as a teenage site. A LOT of people don’t like the idea of cliques, regardless of what they’re actually used for.

Especially on Plurk, which I can honestly say is the friendliest site I’ve ever been on online, the idea of being left out doesn’t feel good.

Still, I think Plurk Cliques are an absolutely awesome idea, if you can get around the name.

When I asked people what questions they’ve had about Plurk, two people mentioned cliques. Kirako said, “Cliques! It says we’re supposed to be able to filter plurks by clique but I guess that doesn’t work yet. Still would like some answers on it.” and RogueTess said, “Still never made a clique. Everyone can see all friends. Is it the clique feature that makes them different? Hmmm.”

It does say we should be able to filter our timeline, but I’ve tried everything I can think of to get it to work, and nothing happens. I’m guessing that ability hasn’t actually been turned on yet. I have writen the devs, otherwise known as the A-team, to ask how to use this feature and when we’ll be able to do it. As soon as I hear back from them, I will let you know.

So, since they can’t filter the timeline yet, what is their purpose and how do you use them?

Did you know you’ve actually used Cliques before? Oh, they weren’t called that, possibly because most applications we use aren’t written expecting their primary market to be teens.

So, the last time you used them, they may have had the boring name of folders. If you use Gmail, you’ll know them as groups. But by any name, it’s still the same thing:

A selection of people that you can send a message to quickly and easily.

I have one on Gmail for people who don’t mind reading the original version of a story I’ve been working on for a year or so. Typos and all, they get to see it, and let me know what they think. I’m betting that in your e-mail you have a way of separating certain people also.

Skype is the only other chat program that I know that allows you to separate people into groups, but in Skype you have to open a new window to communicate with them.

In Plurk, I just set up a clique using whatever criteria I want, write the clique’s name the same as I would send a private message, and hit Plurk.

If you look at the upper left corner of your plurk screen, you’ll see the options shown above. Each of these will open a pop-up window that you can interact with. To create or edit your cliques, you need to click on “My Friends.”

In the orange box that pops up, you will see a row of tabs. Cliques is the second one. By the way, if you haven’t looked under “Blocked users” yet, you might want to. I know when they added it a few days ago, several users found people blocked that they hadn’t added there.

To create a clique, simply use the “Add new clique” button and type in the name of the group you want to make.

Now you’re ready to start adding members.

If you already know the names of the people you want in your group, this part is easy. Start typing the name of the person you want to add, and Plurk brings up a suggestion box to complete the name for you.

But what if you want to create a list and DON’T know everyone’s name?

This makes things a little harder. Plurk doesn’t give you a list of people to choose from, you have to add names to the box instead, which means you need to know who you’re going to add.

After a bit of experimenting, I found that using the two window method was easiest.

It’s rather hard to tell, but on the left, I have the clique I’m working on creating, and on the right, I have a list of friends. In this screen I’m making a Girls Night Out list (sorry guys, you’re not allowed in this one).

Another easy way to know who to add is to ask. I created four or five cliques just from asking questions such as:

How many plurkers are work (or stay) at home parents?

How many do work with Social Media?

and any other groups I could think of that I might want to send specific messages to at some time or another.

Okay, let’s send a message out to one of our groups.

If you look down at the Plurk bar (where you write your messages), you’ll see a choice that says “Private plurks, languages, & options.”

If you click on it, the area underneath will expand to offer you more choices. The area on the left defines who you’ll send this plurk out to:

To send a message to a clique, make sure you select the bottom option. It’s not selected automatically, so I messed up a couple test plurks by forgetting to select it.

A quick note here. You can actually send a plurk to a clique and other individual friends who might be interested. Just include all the names on the line where I wrote Marketing.

Now, type in your message on the message bar, click the big red Plurk button, and viola, you’ve sent a message to your clique!

One last thought for today. When you send a message to a clique, it goes as a private message. Although private messages do show up on your main plurk screen, often that screen is so busy that they get missed.

You can look to see if you have any private messages (or look at the messages that you’ve sent if you want to check for replies or count how many you’ve sent for the day) by clicking the blue box in the bottom right corner of the scrollbar and choosing which view you want.

Wow, it’s hard to believe we’ve almost finished discussing Plurk. Still to come, mobile plurking and a cheat sheet with plurk hints and resources. If you’re not a friend on Plurk yet, use this link to join and add me (please, send a friend request, Plurk only adds as a fan). Plus, you can still leave any questions I haven’t answered yet, either here or on Plurk.