Martin Gomez has taken the liberty of building a plugin for Firefox that allows you to interact with Plurk using a small sidebar. Plurkybar is “an immensely simple Plurk sidebar for Firefox” that you can download, install, and be using within minutes. It’s set to automatically refresh every minute so your timeline will stay up to date.
While Plurkybar is good for seeing your timeline at a glance, it doesn’t allow you to read responses. It’ll also tell you how many responses there are to a plurk. The sidebar appears to show around 20 of the latest plurks in your timeline without the ability to go back further. Most things inevitably get linked out to Plurk, which is fine since all this aims to do is show you a timeline of content - it’s just a sidebar, not a full-fledged application.
I feel like the author wasn’t making good use of vertical space when it comes to the top section. On my Macbook, I wasn’t able to see the full list of qualifiers because they start listing above the actual box. I also think that the logo and icons could have been put on one line, since people with limited space don’t want to see that many pixels misused. If you click on an image link in a plurk, good luck getting back to your timeline. You’ll have to close the sidebar and open it again, which in turn makes you log in again. Despite its flaws, it’s still a nice alternative to a previous attempt at a sidebar.
Will someone just create an app already?
Rob is one of the founders of Microblink. His interests include how people are using microblogs and the community growing around them.
Mike writes and edits for Microblink day-in and day-out. He is known as the marketing guy and handles most of the microblogging accounts.
Mark writes development-oriented posts as well as news items. He's not afraid to dive headfirst into technical topics for the sake of the team.
Thank you! Plurkybar has been updated to 0.02. 0.01 users should experience an auto-upgrade.