Add Koornk to your site

Here’s a neat way to let visitors to your blog or profile page on the web know what you’re up to at the moment: Display your latest updates there with a customized widget.

Grab the HTML code below and paste it into your web page - replace ##USER## with your Koornk username.

<div id="koornk_statuses">
<h3>Koornk Updates</h3>
<ul id="koornk_update_list"></ul>
<a href="http://koornk.com/user/##USER##/" id="koornk-link" style="display:block;text-align:right;">follow me on Koornk</a>
</div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://koornk.com/tools/koornk/widget.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://koornk.com/api/timeline/##USER##/?callback=koornk_callback&limit=3"></script>


To ensure loading of your page even in the case of koornk.com non-loading, move the two lines that start with <script type="text/javascript"... to the bottom of your page (just above </body>)

Moved to WordPress

We are now live on WordPress :)

Some comments from previous platform disappeared - will be restored as soon as possible. Also, if you have any suggestions or wishes about plugins / widgets / add-ons, let us know.

Pick a topic, any topic

As promised in the previous post, we rolled out the topics feature in Koornk yesterday. Topics are a simple way of grouping and following conversations between a group of users.

Topics originate in hash-tags - You know those words starting with a # (hash)? Well users decided to mark words of special importance in tweets and clucks with a hash, to be able to use them as tags. This told the reader and the website’s search function what the post was about. This is a very useful tool, because it enabled users to group and read posts about a topic, even if they weren’t following the users that posted them.

Here’s an example of how Koornk lists posts containing a hashtag: take #macworld for instance.

While hashtags are very simple to use, they do have a few problems:

• you can only use one word for a hashtag
• the hashtag takes up valuable space in a tweet or cluck
• because of these two issues, people tend to shorten hashtags, which then become weird-looking groups of letters and numbers, and usually not everyone uses the same hashtag
• at the time of writing, there’s no easy way to check which tags exist
• most users don’t know about hashtags

So these are the problems we tackled with the new Topics feature.

Topics enable you to start a conversation very easily, just by clicking on the pin icon and entering the name of the topic. Koornk will suggest topics that contain the words you’re writing, to help you choose an existing topic if someone already started it.

You can see the “on topic” information for every cluck about a topic and if you click on any topic, you’ll be able to read the conversation and start following it.

The topics you’re following appear in the “My topics” section and you can see the whole conversation, even if there are users you’re not following.

These are like your personal bookmarks for the stuff you don’t want to miss. Instead of seeping through numerous pages of posts you missed over a day or two, you’ll be able to jump to Topics and catch-up on the conversations you’re following.

And to make Topics even more useful, and reading the Recent tab less cluttered with chatter, we added the option to Filter clucks.

You can choose to:

• hide replies - removes all replies from the Recent feed, leaving just “regular” clucks
• hide my topics - removes clucks on the topics you’re following, because they are already accessible under the Topics tab
• hide other topics - removes clucks from your friends on topics you’re not following

So if you decide to check all three boxes, you will be left with just plain clucks; no replies, no topics - no chatter.

After being away for a day or two, your Recent tab can have multiple pages of unread posts, so we think these tools will enable you to read your friends’ statuses, skip the chatter if you feel like it, but still not miss anything important you’re discussing.

Example:

Let’s say you start a conversation with a few people about attending a conference in two weeks and you agree to manage all details about travel and lodging through Koornk, so you set a topic. After a couple of days you might not feel like going through old clucks, trying to find if someone posted anything regarding the conference. Instead you head straight to Topics and see if there’s anything new.

Creating new topics is easy, but communication in existing topics is even easier. Whenever you’re reading about a topic in the Topics tab, whatever you write in the Status box will be submitted to that topic. And if you’re reading your Recent feed and reply to a friend’s post that’s marked with a topic, your reply will also appear in that topic. Very natural, right?

We have seen Twitter and Koornk become more than just status-reporting and micro-blogging tools. They became places for discussion and conversation. And that’s good. It’s just that it’s not good for everyone all the time. So why not have options, to make communication easier?

We’ll be adding on features to make reading even more simple, but we’d like to hear from you now. Is this useful to you? Do you miss anything?

Let us know and we’ll take your opinions into account. We hope you have fun with the new features!