The story behind koornk

In an idyllic little country called Slovenia, where the Alps meet the Adriatic sea, web gurus meet for a picnic every year. In the magical geeky atmosphere they never run out of silly wonderful ideas. In June of 2008 they added another attraction to the picnic in the form of an open stand-up speaker’s corner, aptly named Jekyll Park :)

One of the many fun ideas was a long talked about wish for an application that would resemble Twitter, but would offer localization and other cool new features.

The Challenge

The debate sparked a challenge – who, when and how to build this app, preferably in less than a week. The question wasn’t *if* we need it, it was clear that the challenge was “we want a localized microblogging app”.

There were several geeks from Domenca present at the picnic, among them Matija, who saw this as a personal challenge and a nice little test for our new social networking platform Skyooz, that we’ve been building.

Sixteen hours later…

koornk.com was alive and the first version of the app was active. In 16 hours Matija had programmed, designed and implemented the basic features of a microblogging site onto Skyooz. Truth be told, he spent most of those 16 hours making sure the site worked on Internet Explorer :S (Save the developer!)

So in an extremely short amount of time, we were able to produce a brand new brand and site that featured microblogging. By the way - the name “koornk” comes from Slovenian language and is a geeky way to write the word meaning henhouse – where the chickens just can’t shut their peepholes.

Clucking

Since the name of the app means a henhouse, we call the messages clucking, the sound chickens make :)

In a month of non-advertised existence of koornk we’ve gathered 700 users, who made us commit to more development and new features. We now put in a couple of hours every week to make koornk your favorite place to cluck. We’ve seen new users from all around the world, who appreciate the cool features of koornk:
- pinging other social websites (like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc.) with new clucks (overping.fm)
- monitoring answers to your clucks and mentions of your name
- easy and handy way to create short URLs for your links
- user search
- fast loading
- OpenID support
- and many other features from our to-do list

Then openness of the development and communication has made it possible to get many new way of clucking. Using the API our users created a Mac Widget, Firefox plugin, Wordpress plugin and other extensions.

Koornk is creating many new ideas and opportunities, so join us and start clucking. If you can, help us with development, we’ll love you for it ;)