As kids, we wrote letters to Santa. After snail mail became antiquated, email became the preferred medium. Now, Santa has entered the microblogging world. A few times actually. Whether you’re looking to tell Santa about your Christmas wishlist or you want to alert him of some cookies and milk, here’s where you can find him:

• SantaClaus25
• SantaClaus
• Santa
• SClaus
• MrsClaus25
• OperationSanta
• AskSanta
• RealSantaClaus

Know of any other “mall santas” or other holiday characters that are floating around the microblogging world? Let us know with a comment.

Update #1: Added 3 Santas, thanks @Twitter_Tips!

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?

We received a Google Alert recently that led us to this blog run by Plurk user @kupy. What he’s done with his blog is transform it into what looks like a Plurk timeline. This is something that I’ve never seen before, and is actually pretty well done all the way down to the JavaScript behaviors and CSS. He’s definitely got a great start, but there are some things he needs to work on (blue text on a black background, come on!).

The Plurk Team is pretty mum when it comes to updates. However, this morning, @amix plurked that the Instant Messenger features were ready to be used. IM works two ways, both to send Plurks and to be notified of new Plurks or responses.

To receive IM notifications from a specific user, go to your “My Friends” tab. The left-most box is where you toggle IM notifications on and off. I couldn’t find a way to turn all on, but you probably don’t want to do that anyway. You can see from this image that I’ve turned on IM notifications for @microblink simply by clicking the box.

There are some reasonably sophisticated functions baked right in to the IM bot. To start using IM, click “My Account”, then the Instant Messaging tab. Enter your IM of choice (right now only Google Talk and Jabber work) and you’ll be prompted to add the Plurk IM Bot as a friend. From there, you can type “help” to see what you can do. One of the options is to turn new plurk notifications on or off; the same is available for responses.

There is a small glitch in receiving response notifications. If you mute a plurk and that plurk receives a response, you still get the response delivered to your IM client. There are also some minor quirks with langauge determination on a plurk from the IM bot.

What does this mean for Plurk?

Other networks such as Rejaw and Identi.ca support IM also. You’ll probably remember Twitter pulling the plug on IM recently, but they did at one point have it too. This is the first mainstream alternative for interacting with Plurk. Third-party applications are nowhere to be found (other than Plurk for the iPhone) and it doesn’t seem like many people are worried about that. Many plurkers are content to use the web interface because of how its laid out and the functions that are built in to it.

Plurk has been growing since it was released. Some argue that Plurk was a temporary stop-gap while Twitter was having downtime issues, while some argue that Plurk is becoming more popular by the day. No matter which side of the fence you stand on, alternative interaction for a microblogging platform is a good thing.

With Twitter being the first major microblogging platform, they were also the first one to implement the “everyone stream”, a warp-speed listing of the most recent messages on the system, constantly being updated. As other platforms have popped up, they’ve each addressed the everyone stream in a different way.

Today we’ll take a look at several popular microblogging platforms (Twitter, Pownce, Plurk) and how they handle the everyone stream.

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The Plurk team continues to crank out new features based on user requests and ideas to enhance the Plurk experience. Some of these were fairly minor updates such as adding sub-qualifiers, but last week the team shared two new and very notable features.

For users with a Karma of 25 or higher, they have probably noticed they can now upload images directly to Plurk to be shared in their stream. For a long time Plurk has allowed image sharing through 3rd party hosting services, but this is the first time users have be able to store images locally on the Plurk site.

Last week the Plurk team also announced the launch of Plurk Labs. Plurk Labs is an analytic tool for Plurk streams. The site allows visitors to look up any Plurk user and display three different breakdowns of the stream. Read the full story

The most controversial aspect of Plurk in regard to the social networking world is its use of karma. From what I can tell, it’s the only service that uses it as a core concept. Many users have been outraged that karma drops occur after just four hours of inactivity. This means that the act of sleeping - one which everyone must do - causes users to get penalized. Twice if you’re following the guideline of eight hours per night.

@amix, the lead developer for the Plurk network, made an announcement on Wednesday that he relaxed the restrictions on karma drops. Instead of drops occuring after four hours of inactivity, drops will now occur after twelve hours of inactivity. He feels this is a reasonable length of time before penalties occur. The mainstay of karma in the Plurk network, according to @amix, is that it makes people come back and it keeps the network fresh and interactive.

Karma is the hot-button topic of Plurk. From an objective standpoint, karma binds people to the service to prevent their karma from going down, which fosters use of the service and makes it more fun to be on because others are on it more often. I understand why karma was implemented, but most people don’t see it from that stance. Many people want karma to be gone entirely, while others want it to be optional. Ultimately, each user decides how much attention they pay it.

Since Plurk joined the microblogging world many users have been clamoring over the threaded replies feature it includes. When you post a message on Plurk, all responses are tracked on a single, permalinked page, making it easy to see how people are reacting or responding to your message.

Other services also make use of this format for replies, like Pownce, Rejaw and Kwippy, but Twitter has yet to implement anything of the sort. The lack of this type of feature on Twitter is something that has driven users to places like Plurk where they feel they can hold more discernible conversations.

Though Plurk did a great job implementing a way to organize replies, what they didn’t do was make it easy for users to find which conversations they replied to or participated in, until now.

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Though some may argue the point, microblogging is no longer simply a harbor for inane, random messages from one person to another. One group of users utilizing these platforms for a different purpose are writers and authors, using the short message inputs to create short stories and novels.

Writers have already put down the pen and paper in favor of their keyboard and a word processor, but microblogging makes things even easier. PSFK points out that the medium has obvious advantages for the writer just trying to find time to get thoughts down. When everyone is bombarded my media and other aspects of life 24/7, it can be difficult to find the time to write a full-length story. Where microblogging comes in is that authors can jot out pieces of their storyline right as they are thinking about it, from wherever they are.

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Plurk sets itself apart from other microblogging services by taking a drastically different approach to recognizing its users. There is the obvious method of “Karma”, but this is only one of the changes in a world that normally judges users by number of followers and posts. What sets Plurk apart from the rest are the many other little things in user profiles. A couple of my favorites include number of responses and friends invited, but what I really appreciate is the use of badges.

In a new badge, released yesterday, Plurk is truly recognizing a few of its users who are helping to build a passionate user community. Its newest badge identifies creators of a Plurk community site. This is a wonderful addition as the badge will identify Plurk enthusiasts who have greatly contributed to the success of Plurk by creating their own projects aligned with the spirit of the Plurk team.

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