A Plurky Idea

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.