This new flavor could end up being the sweet spot between the Delicious we've come to know and the interesting but relatively niche TrailMeme (http://trailmeme.com/). I can see some interesting hacker focused stacks emerge that aggregate quality links around, say, getting started with a new technology or maybe fund raising.
The challenge with "stacks" though, as with any list curation web app, is 1) maintaining the quality of content and 2) surfacing higher quality collections as you scale and become more and more inclusive. And these are hard problems to tackle without having humans sift through thousands of stacks to pick the diamonds in the rough (Visit http://www.imdb.com/lists/ to see what I mean).
@il: Thank you, this is really insightful content.
I might be digressing here, but since you've offered to answer a few questions, here goes - I'd love to know what categories / sites I want to be looking at if my product's a small business CRM (like Highrise). To be more specific, it's a CRM tool that integrates deeply with Google Apps.
Maybe it's just me, but identifying a list of target categories that fits your audience well seems just as hard as optimizing the spend, especially when the audience isn't exactly niche.
You want to segment your audience really finely and then build out a target list based on that.
Who is your CRM for? Technology startups? Computer repairmen? Telemarketers?
And then work backwards from there to keywords/sites that you think would be most relevant.
All other things being equal, does how early (or late) you fill up the application form have any bearing on whether or not you make the grade? (I hope not)
You might think that this initial bias wouldn't help much in the end because the buyer would proceed to evaluate both startups and pick the one they thought was better. However, the bias isn't easily severable.
Again, I don't have any evidence beyond the anecdotal, but it's not even funny how critical a role this seemingly tenuous bias can play in large enterprise sales (where competing vendors offer nearly identical products / services). Makes a solid case (if you buy into the intuition, that is) for backing up an aggressive sales strategy with a well rounded marketing effort.
While the envolve plugin is extremely interesting, the HN implementation would probably be far more useful if you scraped the HN username for logged-in users and displayed it. Anonymity seems to kill the utility of chat. For those that wish to participate anonymously, you can always offer the option to opt out.
The current implementation uses an iframe and so they can't read the data out of the iframe (same-origin policy).
This would require injecting javascript on to news.ycombinator.com. It wouldn't be so bad, but it would require user interaction to do that. If it requires user interaction then it'll be less used.
Granted, they could make an extension which does that -- but now you have to download something just to use chat. That's a big barrier to entry.
You can't do that. Though it seems like the sites are composed, they are in fact just embedded viewports (iframe). The only way to scrape username, at the moment, is to turn that app into a plugin/bookmarklet, or at least bootstrap from one.
EDIT: Or API/embedded script, but that of course requires the cooperation of site's owner.
Needed: A multi-select that lets me decide what Circles serve as default sources for my Stream.
tl;dr To let me cut out the noise without the fear of missing out.
Why: My "Following" Stream is essentially a Twitter echo chamber, and most of the folks that post here are really prolific.
This drowns out any posts from friends & family, and I have to make an explicit click to view each of these streams.
For instance, right now, Robert Scoble is hogging most my Stream real estate.
I'd like to select "Friends" + "Family" + "Acquaintances" as the default sources for my Stream. I don't mind clicking on the "Following" filter to peruse this specific Stream every now and then, just like I dip into Twitter. I don't want these posts, however, to dominate my default Stream. And I don't want to have to delete my "Following" Circle to make this happen.
It would be quite easy to do UI-wise, you can already select either "Stream" for the whole thing or an individual Circle. Just let us click on multiple Circles at once.
Then add a setting somewhere to multi-select your default stream Circles.
Some of the other things i'd like to see (or should I split this into a separate post?)...
- Make Sparks work more like reader. Sparks has HUGE potential but right now I have no idea how it pulls content and from what sources. It doesn't seem to update much though. Let us do an initial search for content for the keyword, but then also add RSS feeds to each keyword so it can be our one-stop-shop for perusing new content each day (both from the RSS feeds we added, and from the default Spark query engine). Format it a bit more like Reader too, title + expandable box for content.
- Bring in our Buzz posts as "Public" posts on Plus. What's going to happen to Buzz anyway? I really liked it, but surely it's deprecated now with public Plus posts?
THIS! It's only been a day for me but I'm already noticing that people I don't know are own my stream. It's ok to click to a specific circle but I would love if it defaulted to people I actually know and have to seek out the following.
I believe noelsequeira is referring to the stream, which is what Facebook calls the "news feed".
It would be nice to be able to set relative ratios for how often posts from different circles show up, to result in varying frequency of the top or recent posts from each circle.
At the risk of sounding like a complete cynic, isn't this nothing more than a shameless PR plug? And I think the bigger villain here isn't said company or their PR agency, it's CNN for carrying this crocodile-tear-jerking piece.
And if you're considering the "every little step counts and must be lauded" counter-argument, spare a thought for every faceless, deserving non-profit that's doing genuine, sustainable, long-term grassroots work and doesn't receive a shred of credit / support, let alone a mention from the mainstream media.
To quote from the article:
Story Highlights:
The residents of Shiv Nagar changed the village name to SnapDeal.com Nagar /
They wanted to show their gratitude to the online coupon company /
SnapDeal installed 15 water pumps so that villagers could have potable water /
SnapDeal's founder was tossed from the United States after his visa expired
"Tossed"? Really? Yes, immigration laws suck (I should know, I'm Indian), but I'm certain it's a lot less dramatic when your visa expires. Let's not trivialize the effort to improve the immigration status quo by dangling insinuations that extol pseudo-philanthropy.
What hurts me most, though, is that this hit the front page of HN.
Sure there are non-profits that do a lot of good but that doesn't mean what Snapdeal has done is not worthy of recognition nor does it mean CNN should not cover them. And because Snapdeal is a startup likely busy trying to make money, scale, etc, their action is "unexpected" and perhaps more newsworthy as a result. Unfortunately, "Red Cross helps village" would not be a particularly interesting story for CNN or any news outlet.
Yes - it is good PR for Snapdeal and whether it was a calculated PR move or just a good action being rewarded with press (I think it's the latter), it shouldn't matter. They did some good and if this was actually a calculated PR move, good for them for finding a PR hack that gets them onto CNN while actually doing some substantive good work at the same time.
And last somewhat unrelated point, as a fellow Indian (Indian-American), I always find it curious and somewhat unfortunate that there is a contingent of "the tribe" that can't just be happy when others in the "the tribe" do well. Can't we just be happy for the guy, the village, the company, etc and do without the scorn?
This will be my last response in this thread - I don't wish to troll / waste my resources on an argument that doesn't deserve them.
>why the bitterness
Because I'm yet to see a more primed-for-PR CSR initiative. At least from a startup. Much as I'd like to perceive it as being well-intentioned, it smacks of being the brainchild of a PR agency ("snapdeal.com Nagar" anyone?), which is all kinds of wrong. I'd have been just as indignant if it were Groupon or Facebook that pulled this off.
>their action is "unexpected" and perhaps more newsworthy as a result
There's a not-so-fine-line between innovative PR and inappropriate opportunism, and a responsible company would know better than to cross it. And that's the beauty of this issue - you're damned if you take a stand against it, because "they did help a poor village after all". If, as a business, you really wish to be an ameliorating influence, do it quietly - don't pimp poverty for PR. There are always other ways to grab eyeballs.
>as a fellow Indian (Indian-American), I always find it curious and somewhat unfortunate that there is a contingent of "the tribe" that can't just be happy when others in the "the tribe" do well.
That I'm afraid, is the classic ad hominem. Please read the parent comment once again and point out one instance where I've expressed disdain or envy for the company / the founder's success. As I've already said, I'd have been just as enraged had this been any other company from any other country. That you would confuse indignation at a dodgy PR stunt with envy for a fellow Indian baffles me.
Guess just a difference of perspectives. It's unfortunate that you're willing to impugn this entire sequence of events and everyone involved despite having no real evidence that this was in fact done for PR.
But even if it was an elaborate PR effort, there is nothing wrong with enlightened self-interest. CSR activities of all types by mega-, large and small corporations can all be viewed with such cynicism, but if an article on a website and some more visitors to Snapdeal is what it takes to impact some positive change (water to a village), that sounds like a net positive.
Installed. Quite ironically, this is more or less what I thought Notifo would aim to be the first time I stumbled upon your website.
While I'm not particularly crazy about receiving notifications from most blogs I read, what I'm really looking for (from a notification aggregator) is the ability to receive notifications from the sources that I care about (essentially, social networks + email + blogs) in one place.
What this means is, I can disable popups (alerts) and enjoy a zen-like experience. And when I do take a break, there's one app that lets me know about everything I've potentially missed out on and need to be updated about. Push notifications create this insatiable itch and the cognitive cost of context switching ensures that life goes downhill once more than a couple of apps have been allowed to notify me.
This is something I'd be happy to pay for (and I admit, I might be alone). I think Boxcar comes closest to scratching my itch, but their implementation still leaves a lot to be desired, so I guess there's an opportunity there.
Interesting aside: I'm pretty sure your intention was jest, but lolling isn't as modern a word as the internet generation would have you believe (and has an entirely different meaning).
mid-14c., lollen "to lounge idly, hang loosely," perhaps related to M.Du. lollen "to doze, mumble," or somehow imitative of rocking or swinging. Specifically of the tongue from 1610s.
The challenge with "stacks" though, as with any list curation web app, is 1) maintaining the quality of content and 2) surfacing higher quality collections as you scale and become more and more inclusive. And these are hard problems to tackle without having humans sift through thousands of stacks to pick the diamonds in the rough (Visit http://www.imdb.com/lists/ to see what I mean).