What Plinky Is and How to Make It Better.
“Plinky. Because sometimes you need a push.” This is the line that is at the top of the Plinky.com homepage and really it tells you all you really need to know about the site. Well, not all you need to know, but after you have the basic idea down it tells you all you need to know. So basically Plinky is a site where people submit prompts and other people answer those prompts. The newest prompt on there at the time I am writing this is “How’s your 2011 going so far?” It’s a simple question and you may have already wanted to write about it yourself, but now you get to without feeling like no one called for it. Or maybe you don’t really know what to write, but you know you want to write something.
Well, that’s what Plinky is for and that’s really all it’s for. You can have followers and you can follow people. You can favorite things people write or people can favorite your writings. You can suggest prompts, but only some get approved.
And that is an interesting thing. On many sites devoted to some sort of creativity there is string of media that is posted on the site. It just comes and goes as fast as people put it in. But on Plinky people submit a prompt and it is approved and the prompts are released one at a time. So you don’t have a bunch of ridiculous prompts popping up all over the place crowding out the good ones. Some may say that there could easily be a link to a “most popular” section or something, but on a site like Plinky people may have so many different tastes that there may not be a real definitive group of the most popular and then people would still have to sift through the clutter to find the good stuff.
The most interesting thing about Plinky, and possibly the reason for its survival, may be the ability to connect it to other social networking sites. Like Blogs. And Twitter and Facebook and all that. But I first noticed it because I had a blog that I was having trouble writing for. If it wasn’t for my blog I wouldn’t give a damn about Plinky. Who cares if you want to answer some random question some person asked a bunch of people? Ahh, but if you are looking for something to write then it becomes quite handy. Also, when you answer a Plinky prompt and have it sent over to your blog then it automatically puts a little tag at the bottom that says “powered by Plinky,” which is kind of handy when the topic is somewhat random.
That’s what Plinky is. Now it’s time to talk about how it could be better.
There are some small things like a “remember me” or “keep me signed in” button. Not a big deal, but if you’re going to be using it often then having to log back in every time can get tedious. Another thing that would be handy is a suggestions page. A place where you can make suggestions and people can vote on them and if a suggestion stays under a number of votes for a certain amount of days then it’s deleted or whatever. Also, a place in your profile that you can save prompts that you find interesting, but don’t have time to write about at the moment. And that’s all of the suggestions I can think of at the moment.
Plink is a pretty cool sight and if you’re reading this blog then you probably have at least some interest in writing and you should check it out. There are never any advertisements on the site and it’s about as straightforward as it gets so if you’re into that as well you may enjoy it.
