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!

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.