We are starting this great tradition to honor communication, social media and the written word. Get involved in Extra Character Day by writing your clucks just a bit (or a character) longer today. We can also recommend a few one letter words:

a – the indefinite article
I – the first person singular nominative pronoun
O – an interjection derived from the vocative case of Latin, commonly used in poetry
Both I and O are capitalized when used.

There are also various single letter words used as abbreviations in text-speak and related uses:

b – “be” or “bee”
c – “sea” or “see”
f – “fat”
g – “Gee”
I – “eye”
j – “jay”
k – “okay”
n – “and”
o – “oh”
p – “pea” (small green vegetable) or “pee” (to urinate)
q – “cue” or “queue”
r – “are”
t – “tea”
u – “you”
v – “very”, for example: V Graham Norton
x – part of the phrase “x out”
y – “why”
Various digits have also been pressed into service in this manner:

1 – “won”
2 – “to”, “too”. Can also be used as part of a word. E.g. 2moro (tomorrow).
4 – “for” – Can also be used as part of a word. The complete list: a4d, 4cast, 4m, 4mer, 4milk, 4most, 4t, 4ty
6 – Can be used as part of “sixty” (6ty)
7 – Can be used as part of “seventy” (7ty)
8 – “ate” – Can also be used as part of a word. The completete list: abdic8, adumbr8, adjucdic8, ag8, anim8, b8, b8d calibr8, celeb8, celebr8, complic8, cr8, d8, defic8, dumbw8r, equ8, f8, g8, gr8, h8, infl8, infl8able, ir8, irrig8, l8, l8r, mastic8, m8, navig8, obl8, pal8, pal8al, pl8, r8, r8d, r8ing, s8, sk8, sk8r, st8, str8, t8r, urin8, veget8, w8, 8y
9 – “night”, a shortened form of “good night”

(all the great one word info via Wikipedia).

Have fun.

koornk inline media

When watching videos, you get all the regular YouTube controls, so everything feels familiar right out of the box :)

YouTube video with all the regular controls

How do you upload media and make it display inline? The regular way. Just post a pikchur photo or paste a link to a video on YouTube and the miracolous koornk engine will do the rest (it recognizes the link as media content and displays it inline). You will have to reload the page so the server will cache the content and display it right in your cluck.

If you don’t want media being displayed inside of clucks, you can always disable the feautre with just one simple click in the ‘Filter clucks’ menu in the right sidebar.

We also made the use of topics simpler and more streamlined. You can now assign a cluck to a topic with the use of hashtags (if the topic is only one word). And it also has an autocomplete feature.

If you start writing a cluck, that you want to assign to the topic #tek, you write your cluck, enter the hashtag (#) and the first letter of the topic and then just select it from the list of topics that start with the letter t.

(the list only displays topics that you already follow)

The same autocomplete feautre has been added to the user mention system.

And last, but not least, we’ve added a recluck (RT) feautre, which lets you recluck someting that you found really interesting by just clicking ‘->’ inside that cluck. The icon is located just below the ‘reply’ button.

We hope you enjoy the new features and if you have anything to say about them, koornk or any other thing going on at the universe, just let us a cluck #koornk :)

Gravatar lets you upload a picture or avatar of yourself and use on various sites around the web. So when you comment on a Gravatar enabled site, your picture will appear beside your comment. We have full support for Gravatar in the status streams on Koornk. If you would like to create your own Gravatar icon you can do so here.

screenshot from “photo settings” when logged in:

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>)

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.

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!

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.

You know what to do with the form below, right? :)

You can vote for Koornk once per day until midnight on November 30th (more).

Thanks again for your support, please keep voting for us!

** widget has been removed

Help us by nominating Koornk in Mashable Open Web Awards - all you have to do is drop your e-mail address in the form below, confirm your nomination, and you’re done!

Thanks for your support!

** widget has been removed

Med številnimi zabavnimi in odbitimi idejami je prišla tudi pobuda za izdelavo spletne aplikacije, ki bi bila po funkcionalnosti podobna Twitterju, vendar lokalizirana in prirejena za uporabo v našem prostoru. 

Izziv

Pobuda je sprožila pestro debato o tem, kdo, kdaj in kako to narediti. Dileme, ali to potrebujemo, ni bilo več, saj je bilo vzpostavljeno splošno mnenje: “Radi bi kratka sporočila pisali v slovenščini in na sistem, ki bi bil prilagojen za nas”.

Na pikniku so bili tudi sodelavci Domence, med drugim naš razvojnik Matija, ki je to pobudo sprejel kot osebni izziv in hkrati preizkus naše platforme za spletne skupnosti in družbena omrežja – Skyooz. Cilj: Izdelava orodja za pošiljanje kratkih sporočil o tem, kaj trenutno počnemo in kaj počnejo naši prijatelji in znanci. Popularno mikrobloganje torej. 

Šestnajst ur kasneje…

je bila na domeni koornk.com že postavljena prva delujoča različica projekta. V teh 16 urah je Matija uspel opraviti razvoj, oblikovanje in implementacijo funkcionalnosti na platformo. Resnici na ljubo, je precejšen del tega časa je odpadlo na prilagoditev za Internet Explorer :S (Save the developer!)

Na platformi Skyooz nam je uspelo praktično iz nič narediti delujočo spletno aplikacijo, kjer so že kokodajsali prvi uporabniki. In s tem še ni bilo konec presenečenj.

Kokodajsanje

Dober mesec po predstavitvi koornka slovenskemu spletu, je bilo v njem že več kot 700uporabnikov. To je za nas pomenilo zavezo, da koornk razvijamo naprej, ga plemenitimo in dodajamo nove funkcionalnosti. Sedaj se razvoju posveča nekaj ur tedensko. V koornk so se začeli pridruževati tudi uporabniki iz drugih koncev sveta, saj so ugotovili, da ponuja nekaj zanimivih funkcionalnosti:
- obveščanje drugih spletnih servisov (npr. Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, …) o novih kokodajsih (preko ping.fm),
- spremljanje odgovorov in omemb na tvoje kokodajse,
- priročno krajšanje in objavljanje povezav na spletne naslove,
- iskalnik po uporabnikih,
- hitro in zanesljivo delovanje,
- podpora za OpenID,
- in še mnogo več stvari, ki so trenutno na to-do seznamu :)

Odprtost razvoja in komuniciranja je omogočila, da so na podlagi API-ja že kmalu nastali pripomočki za lažje kokodajsanje: Mac Widget, Firefox plugin, Wordpress plugin in drugi.

Koornk odpira veliko novih idej in priložnosti, zato se nam pridruži in kokodajsaj. Če znaš, pa nam lahko pomagaš tudi pri razvoju, radi te bomo imeli ;)