Now you can search for new friends on Plurk. There still is no way to search for people by keyword though. The area search is very limited too. You can only search by town, not area around the town. But there is a way to search.

On Plurk you can now search by country, state and town, so you can find people that live near you. You can also search by age, language, gender if you want to filter your search down more. I've already found a couple people who live near me, not many though. People around here are not very Internet savvy.