Yiktik is a social news bookmarking site.
It is a simple tool that lets people submit stories which other people can rate.
While the highly rated stories appear on the buzzing page, the newly submitted ones are found on the recent page.
Yiktik started off as a side project with my friend Satheesh while I was working in Iflex. It was conceptualized by us on a november night in 2007 when we were pretty
drunk and began making fun of the so called web 2.0 me too sites. After that long discussion we came to the conclusion that there was something lacking for
business and professional users of the web. Yes they had their linkedins and the techcrunches but never a platform for collaboratively sharing bookmarks, news or for that matter any information.
We decided that there was a serious need for such a website where a person could come to one single place and read the top stories of the day instead of scourging it from 20 different sites.
This would especially be helpful to a person who lacks the time to go to a lot of sites in the morning just to get the top headlines.
Yiktik runs on LAMP, for the not so geeky that is Php+Mysql on Apache server and linux OS. I quit my cozy job at Iflex to concentrate full time on yiktik and after 3 months of being jobless and a steadily decreasing bank balance
yiktik was launched on January 29th of 2008.
Yiktik was created basically from scratch by us. I created the core frameworks from bottom-up and decided not to use any other already available ones like cakephp or symfony. We figured we wanted to be "personal" with the code right from the begining and decided to skip the learning curve that these frameworks had with them. I still can't tell whether this is a good decision on the part of site architecture but it was a hell of a learning experience for me to start with absolutely nothing. A lot of work went into query optimizations. The query execution time for a few queries have been reduced by more than a factor of 100. Front end wise we figured we needed to give an user the best possible interface. A consensus was made to use as AJAX as possible without making the user scratch their heads wondering whether anything is happening or not. The challenges and experience we had building this site has been of phenomenal use to me, especially in my present job at SlideShare.
The site is still live and you have to register to post, rate or comment on stories. We are thinking of taking it in a new direction, so keep an eye on her in the coming days. Till then happy posting!
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