Converations made easy in Koornk

There’s been much going on in the past few days around the notion that Twitter lacks some major user interface features, which would make it simpler for users to write their tweets and follow others. (See Dave Winer #1 and #2, Techcrunch and others.) We think Koornk has some nice solutions that we’d like to share.

Now, we’ve seen some feathers flying around about Koornk being a blatant Twitter rip off (that’s actually a TechCrunch quote), so we don’t want to stir things up again. So for the record, Koornk started off as an experiment and a test for our software platform (read how it started), so it’s not a startup competing against Twitter. It’s still a technology playground, but the growing userbase and the “rip off incident” did make us rethink Koornk as a product. This is yet to follow, but for now, check out some cool features we’ve built in our experiment.

The main focus in the debate about Tweetree is that it displays photos and videos inline, but it still lacks proper conversation tracking. We solved this in Koornk by enabling the reader to click for detailed information about the status update. Check it out.

This is what it looks like if you hover over a status update (a “cluck” as we call them) if it’s a reply to someone’s cluck:

And if you click the “in reply to” link, you can see the quote:

Photos anyone? Well if you use Pikchur, which happens to be our photo storage of choice, you can see a camera icon next to your cluck:

And the photo loads in a lightbox if you click the icon:

Of course any other service like Flickr, YouTube etc. could be set up to work the same way.

This way the list of clucks is clean, but it enables you to get extra stuff inline, if you want. What we also wanted to help out with, is writing clucks. So we added two icons to the input field. One is to help you upload photos (we upload them to Pikchur) and the other is to help you create a short link. He’re how it looks if you open both:

Let us know how you like these features over the ones missing from Twitter :) Go ahead and give Koornk a try. Don’t worry, it enables OpenID login and connects to other services like Ping.fm, to make updating easier.

We’ve seen Koornk users really spark up conversations which go on for several tweets or clucks, so we’re working on another cool feature called topics. That will enable any user to create a topic around any single cluck or a conversation. This will basically work as a filter that goes through all status updates (even from people you’re not following) and filters out the ones that concern a specific topic. Keep your eyes peeled, we’re launching this feature very soon.

So we’re continuing to experiment with new userful features in Koornk, sticking to the original idea, that it’s a technology playground. And since these features exist for several weeks or months (the debate in the blogosphere sparked in the past couple of days), please don’t reduce us to just a rip-off again. We *are* trying to come up with cool new stuff.