I’ve been using Plurk like a junky lately and loving it. Just so happens that I have a life on the side of my plurking. I know I know I shouldn’t but I just can’t help it. I’m going to a cottage party and will be back in ~30 hours.

I’ve routinely seen people say wow I didn’t login yesterday and my karma went down or something to that extent. This experiment will let us know if you can build up enough karma to have a life for a day or if you need to login and post like a maniac every single day to appease the karma gods. My karma at the time of posting this is 55.24.

This is just for fun because I’ll continue using Plurk just the same as I always have BUT if it drains my karma considerably I’d equate it to a high maintenance gf or bf.

Let’s see if Plurk throws a hissy fit or let’s one of it’s fans go and have a life. At the very least this will give me something more to plurk about when I return. For what it’s worth I don’t really care if it goes down. It’s like other metrics online that have absolutely no correlation to conversions or actions. It’s just an ego stroke for those “into it” with no bearing on real life hahaha.

The experiment is here; this is my last plurk, plurk reply etc…

http://www.plurk.com/p/e9zb

Let’s see what happens; any predictions!?

Written by: Bloggeries

Many dedicated plurkers will attest the Karma system is cool but at the moment it basically just rewards activity. In a public place activity has to be of social nature to be beneficial. You could go to a busy party and just yell out disconjuncted gribbel which wouldn’t bring anything to the party and in fact would probably annoy other members.

That is what’s happening on PLURK. Many top users have the “stats” to back it up which is lot’s of responses and particularly lot’s of PLURK’s. The problem is these plurks are useless! Read the rest of this entry…

Darren Rowse recently put together a post about the average stats of all top Plurkers. The following are the averages he posted.

* # of Plurks - 838
* # of Plur Responses - 3477
* # of Friend Invites - 10.2
* # of Profile Views - 689
* # of Friends - 82
* # of Fans - 56
* Length of time on Plurk - 3 months
* Also worth noting - all of the top 10 had logged in and been active within the last 24 hours. They are all active in the short term as the long term

My read from this is that by constantly staying active and being conversational, your karma will stay on the positive move.

Here is where it gets interesting… thanks to Plurk Karma Trends, I’ve discovered that your Karma will drop by simply not logging in for a day or two. You can see my Plurk User Karma Trend Graph here.

As the graph shows, my Karma started to drop Sunday morning when I began traveling to Wisconsin. Then, yesterday I went the entire day without access to wifi or internet. It wasn’t until today that I got a chance to log back in and start Plurking again.

Sure enough… my Karma is back on the rise.

So while we do not know the ALGO for Plurk Karma, we do know that it is heavily based on constant activity.

At 10:00 AM yesterday morning I joined Plurk. A few minutes earlier I had commented on a Sphinn story about how I was sticking with Twitter and didn’t much like the Plurk interface. Surprisingly, it didn’t take more than fifteen minutes to A) become increasingly frustrated with Twitter outages, and B) notice replies to my first few Plurks.

I found it interesting how quick dialog takes place within individual Plurk threads on the timeline, and several hours later I was whipping through Plurk like I’d been Plurking for years. It was at this point that I realized… I was hooked.

Twitter’s Biggest Enemy is… Twitter
Two things have happened with Twitter over the past few weeks that have helped me decide to spend more time Plurking. First, Twitter has been down FAR too often. Last night I went an hour and a half without access, and the weekend before I couldn’t get in via my Blackberry for hours on end. When I want to Tweet, I want to Tweet. If I can’t, I want another way to communicate. Twitter just hasn’t been there for me so I must look in other directions.

Secondly, Plurkers have been using Twitter to market their Plurk accounts, as well as the Plurk movement in general. In fact, I never would have heard of Plurk would it not have been for Twitter.

Basically what was happening is that Twitter was down so much that when it came up all I could see in my stream were tweets about Twitter being down and everyone trying Plurk instead.

So, I finally set up my Plurk account and began Plurking. I’ve checked my Tweet stream as often as possible, but it’s been down more than up lately, so I’m finding Twitter less and less valuable with each new day. Plurk, however, is quickly becoming a thriving community with far more features and the ability to actually Plurk something when it comes to mind.

Sorry Twitter… you had me, but now I’m gone.

Plurk Hard,
-Eric