Welcome, welcome...

... and welcome to linkiblog the official weblog of linkibol.com.

linkibol (pronounced lean-kee-ball) means "plenty of links" in Turkish. 

linkibol is not widely known internationally, because it does not (currently) provide a (g)localized version. Actually, around 90% or linkibol's traffic comes directly from Turkey.

You ask why?

Until recently,

• we've been busy adding new features,
  
• fixing bugs,
  
• and building a community around linkibol.

There are still a lot of features to add and bugs to fix. Even so, we consider linkibol a quite mature product, and think that it's the right time to show the rest of the world what linkibol is.

So What the Heck is linkibol Anyway?

linkibol is an ajax-based social web application that can be used for tagging, rating, and voting links and stories.

Curently linkibol is Turkey's first and leading social bookmarking platform has around 9000 unique visitors daily (don't get deceived by Alexa ratings, they don't truely reflect linkibol's traffic, because of site's ajaxified nature).

What Makes linkibol Unique?

Aside from its %100 ajax user interface, there are several key poins that make linkibol stand out from the crowd:

• Focus on Usability and Speed:
  
  Instead of bloating application with mostly unused features, we continuously focus on simplification:
  
  • linkibol is usable in it's default state. Users are encouraged to explore and find hidden gems that are not necessary for the average joe, but make linkibol extremely useful for the power user (some of which we will be sharing in this blog).
  • Which is another way of saying "while using linkibol the user should not think" -- she should not feel in need of looking at help pages (which most users don't do anyway ;) )
  • To speed things up we cache responses, cache images, cache scripts, and lazy load components whenever possible. (We will dive more deep into the speed issue when we examine architecture of linkibol in upcoming posts).
    
    
• Everyone can Contribute:
  
  Another point makes linkibol different from it's counterparts is the fact that anybody can vote on linkibol. Anonymous votes are totally allowed.
  
  
  • Votes are Relative:
    
    "In democracies people are equal, but some people are more equal."
    
    So in linkibol.
    
    The more active a user is, the more vote she has. This makes spamming on linkibol virtually impossible. Here's how the logic flows:
    
    
    • (1) Nobody likes spammers.
    • (2) Each linkibol user has to prove trustworthiness to the community to gain popularity (i.e. increase their karma).
      
    • (3) To promote a link, and make it popular; you should have a high karma.
    • (3) Since nobody likes spammers (1), spammers' karmas are negative. Thus spammers are not popular.
    • (4) If you are not popular, it's very very hard for you to promote your link.
      
    • (5) It is really hard to spam on linkibol. 
    • QED.
      
      
• Contributions Become Instantly Live on the Front Page:
  
  You don't wait to become popular for your story to be heard. As soon as you publish your story, it is immediately promoted on the linkibol front page.
  
  So how do we cope with trolls and spammers (given that we don't even have a single moderator)?
  
  Well, that's where votes are relative part comes into play:
  
  If the contributor is a spammer, she'll gain such a negetive karma that the system (depending on certain metrics) will decide to suspend her membership.
  
  And guess what: When a membership is suspended, all of the links added by the member is gone for good (for the interested, this pruning operation is done a scheduled deamon thread on a regular basis).
  
  To sum up:
  
  
  • If you submit quality content, you'll be promoted.
  • Whereas, if you submit bullshit, you'll be kicked out of linkibol forever.
    
    
  That's linkibol's "what you give is what you get" democracy:

What can I do with linkibol?

linkibol is a social hub where you can save, discover, share, explore links and stories, and have fun ;)

By using linkibol you can; 

• Save all your bookmarks in a central location and access them anywhere around the world.
• Group your bookmarks by labeling them.
• Share your bookmarks with your friends.
• Comment on links, see what others have written as comments.
• Explore the linkiverse to find out more links that match your field of interest.

What's Up with this Blog?

This blog (linkiblog) will be mainly about:

• adventures we've experienced,
  
• obstacles we've got on,
  
• wisdom and understanding we've gained,
  
• fun and pleasure we've been living; while adding value to linkibol.

The main language of this blog will be English, while we will be occasionally posting bilingual articles (in Turkish and English) to announce important news and features.