Today Plurk was not quite stable, slow and often time-out quite a lot, though not exactly ‘Fail-Whale’.
Usually that means the Plurk Team is doing some maintenance work, or even releasing something new. So, when the service was eventually back to normal, I started to look for any changes that might had been done.
I looked and looked and couldn’t find anything, until one Plurk Friend pointed me out (cheers mate!). Obviously I didn’t look hard enough.
Keep Plurking !
I refreshed my Plurk Page just now, and suddenly I heard ‘ding … ding’ at an interval period. I was a little bit annoyed at first because I though it was one of those banner ads that makes annoying noises. So I looked and looked at my Firefox opened tabs. Finally I glanced over my Plurk ‘New Plurk/New Response’ link, and that’s when I saw this 
Cool ! Though, I’m not sure if I want to hear that ‘ding … ding’ sound the whole day
PS: You can, of course, turn it off, as you can see in the screenshot.
Happy Plurking!
To whom it may concern
I just spotted that ‘TimeLine/addPlurk’ call now needs one more additional parameter.
This parameter is ‘uid’, and the value is, as expected, the user_id of the Plurk User that is posting the Plurk.
HTH !
Keep Plurking
After doing Ranking by Score the other day, I set myself back to work on Plurker Stats by Location, which I actually started earlier but had to abandone in favour to the Ranking.
As with others Top 100 Stats, i.e. by Score, Karma, Friends, Fans, Plurks and Responses; you can access the link from the Sidebar on the Stats Page.
Clicking on the ‘by Location’ link will take you to the Stats/Location Page. Alternatively you can go directly to the page via the following address: http://plurkerati.com/stats/location.
To get the list, you must at least specify both Country and Filter by fields. If you drop-down the Country combo-box, you will notice all sort of weird country’s name that you would not have heard before, don’t fret, we are not inventing new imaginary countries here :) The source of the list is actually coming from the Location the each of Plurk User fills in in their Profile
The Filter by combo-box will filter the list on the following criteria:
Optionally, you can specify the State/Region and/or City. Clicking on the Search button will start the search process.
Here is an example of the Result Page:
The result page has titles that will tell you, which filter you were running, e.g. Karma, Friends, Score, etc and the Location that you are specifying, e.b. Great Britain UK >> London, etc.
In addition, there is a permalink link (which contains a direct link to the particular result page), just in case you want to bookmark, or share the result to the world.
As always, any feedbacks or suggestions are welcome.
Keep Plurking !
No, it’s not the next winning number for the Lottery, although if you would try and win it, please remember me
If you visit Plurkerati regularly, especially on the Stats section, you would notice that, often some of the items on the list in there shows some strange sequence of numbers. For example, you would see that some of the users would have 4294967295 of friends, or the others would have 2147483647 number of Plurks. Obviously this can’t be true, and a quick look to their individual Profile Page would prove this, as a matter of fact, for each of the category that shows this number, the Profile page will shows 0 (zero).
So the next thing on my mind was that I must’ve been done something wrong with my code, but another quick check on the data that I received from Plurk, proved that it was clearly not a bug on my code, Plurk put these number on their data, and my code just merely showing what it was receiving.
Then came the curiosity, what are these numbers ? What does it represent ? and why Plurk deliberately put this in their data (because they could’ve just put 0) ?
The answer for the first two questions are so simple that I as a programmer should be ashamed of myself for not knowing it. The two numbers represent the ‘biggest’ number you can have for an Integer in a 32 bits environment.
2^32 = 4294967295, this one is for ‘unsigned’ Integer (positive number only), and for the ’signed’ Integer (negative and positive), the above number is divided by two, which gives 2147483647 !
As for the answer for the third question, I’m not sure. My speculation is that, if one has just registered to Plurk as a new member, Plurk back-end code will assign this number to the Profile. If you have any other explanation, please do share with us
And that concludes our Computer Science 101 for today
‘May the Plurk be with you’
Let’s face it, people like rankings! Ever since we were at school, we always love to see how well we do on certain things, in relation to our peers; be it at Maths, or Sports or Music, etc. And again, when we got older and entered the 9 to 6 institution, we like to see ourselves on the top rank of the pecking order.
It all has anything to do with us being human, not only that we want to be the best, but maybe more importantly we want ‘others’ to recognize that we ‘are’ the best.
Then came Social Networking (SocNet), and suddenly it’s like school all over again. Every SocNet site has Top Ranking List, in every possible categories, accompanying it; and not just one but many.
Plurk doesn’t differ, as soon as it went live, Karma Trend started to track Plurkers’ Karma and presents the Journey to Enlightenment in a nice graphical way.
Another site ranks Plurkers from different category, for example this one is by Location.
Even Plurk’s own Homepage is featuring Top 10 Plurkers by Karma.
Finally, other websites provide Top Ranking List and statistics for all sort of different categories, including by Karma, Friends, Fans, Plurks and Responses. Plurkmania and Plurkerati are the only two websites I know that provide such features.
Despite all the fun we could have by watching these websites, they are not without downsides.
The problem with these Top Lists are that on each of categories they tend to measure rank by only one variable, e.g. Karma only, Friends only. In Plurks’s case (or in SocNets in general), this kind of measurement can give us a false impression of what is really a Top List.
Let’s take example of Top Plurkers by Fans. If you check the top 10 list, you will see the same person in this list would occupy the same spot in the other SocNet’s list, simply because these are the so-called Web 2.0 A-Lister who has thousands of followers (groupies?). There is no way that a regular Plurkers like you and me would make this list.
Another example is Top 10 Karma List. As Eric Odom wrote in his blog post, this list is ‘falsely inflated’. The thing is, the users that has already made it, made it there simply because they signed-up first. So, unless any of them is taking a long Plurk Holiday, there is no way a user that recently signed-up will be able to catch-up.
Yet another example is the Plurks List (a list or Plurkers that Plurk the most). Again Eric Odom
on one of his Plurk, said that Plurkerati has failed on providing Top Listing because it uses Plurk as one of the measurement. He reckoned that this list would encourage spammers. I agree on some extent with this as I see daily Plurkers that would do Kama-Harvesting (post anything just to get Karma up).
What we really need is a way to have a list that represent the real state of a user in the context of Plurkiverse. I have been trying to find another type of measurement to do this, and I came up with two solutions, the first one is easier to do as we’ve already had the ingredients, the second one is a bit harder to code and it requires collaboration from other users.
Plurkerati Score/Rank
The first one was quite an obvious solution, I couldn’t believe I didn’t see it straightaway. Consider the 5 main categories that we’ve already had, i.e. Karma, Friends, Fans, Plurks, Responses. Each Plurker will have his/her rank in each of this list category. What if we add up all 5 ranks together to yield a score, and then based on this score we re-calculate the rank of each Plurker. As a matter of fact I’ve done this, and the result is more balance than before. Let’s take the first Plurker that reached Plurk Nirvana, WendyKnit, if we run her username through Plurkerati Rank page, we will see the following:
And the same again for LeoLaporte (#1 by fans), Bloggeries (#2 by Friends), and Amix (#1 by Plurks):
I think the result of this new ranking algorithm may help a bit in showing the ‘truth’. What do you think ?
Plugg This !
As for my second solution, you will have to wait for the second part of this post :) But I think if you read get my hint, you would know what’s in my mind …
Keep Plurking !
When I found out that my Crontab job was failing an hour ago, I noticed that Plurk has changed their internal API structure, especially in this case the JSON data structure for Plurk object that is returned by the API.
Here is an example of one:
{
"lang": "en",
"qualifier": "thinks",
"plurk_id": 2062966,
"gender": 0,
"age": 21,
"country_id": 217,
"owner_id": 1885550,
"longitude": 103.7539,
"content": "plurk works better with firefox than ie..",
"city_id": null,
"karma": 41.829999999999998,
"latitude": 1.3944000000000001,
"posted": "Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:26:37 GMT",
"user": {
"display_name": "Janellee",
"uid": 1885550,
"gender": 0,
"nick_name": "janellee",
"has_profile_image": 1,
"id": 1885550
},
"id": 2062966,
"region_id": null
}
Now what has clearly changed is that Plurk has added a few fields, e.g.:
Indeed Hello Plurk World !
After I’ve been harassed a few times by some fellow Plurkers of the fact that Plurkerati.com is badly needing a proper blog, here it is
I’m planning to write-up all things pertaining Plurk Development effort in general, and my development on Plurkerati.com in particular.
Happy Plurking !
Recent Comments