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Ask HN: Does anyone want this? Central Badge/Achievement service for the Web

8 points by generalk ↗ HN
I'm working on a badge/achievement provider for social sites. I'm close to having something ready for beta, but the slew of Customer Development posts recently got me wondering: does anyone actually want the thing I'm building?

My thought is that as more social sites start providing badges or achievements, it will be useful for users to be able to track all of their badges at a central location, and it will be useful for providers to have an API available to create and assign badges, and generate leaderboards, statistics, and webpages.

Does anyone have a site that would benefit from that? Is there something I've missed that would make the service more useful, given my brief description above? Questions, advice, criticism all welcome.

EDIT: To clarify, our customers are the social sites that would like to provide badges/achievements to their users but don't want to manage that themselves.

12 comments

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FreeRadical
I'm not sure where the customer pain is? Are there really users out there frustrated because they can't see all their badges in one place?

If you're approaching the problem from the other POV, as in social sites don't want to manage their own badge process, and hence you're offering a 'white label' badge service, then there is potential.

generalk
My summary may not have indicated that, but that's correct, the idea would be that we're providing the service (and charging) achievement/badge providers. Their users will get benefits, but we wouldn't market this to end users, or charge them for it.

Hope that helps clarify some.

FreeRadical
I think it's a good idea but all the social sites that matter surely have, or will create their own (for example foursquare).
generalk
That's true. Initially we may pitch to a few established organizations that do their own badges (foursquare, stack overflow) to see if they'd have any interest in such a service, but I'm imagining that early customers will be new social sites or services.
ryanelkins
Then again, User Voice and Get Satisfaction seem to be doing OK despite the fact that people could always "make their own" customer feedback systems.

The question should be whether achievements/badges can be significantly complex enough to lead someone to consider paying for it as a service rather than doing it themselves. This is pretty much true for any SAAS company.

limist
Am curious what the main websites/services are that issue user badges on some semblance of meritocracy?

StackOverflow.com is one obvious one where the awards have some weight (at least with some developers), but where else?

generalk
That's an interesting question, but I'm not necessarily concerned with that.

For instance, a foursquare-like service would offer badges based not on merit but on how many times you've visited a certain location or how many checkins you perform in a night. That service could use our badges API to award these badges, and not have to write/maintain that portion themselves.

Saavedro
Even those have some merit weight. Many visits to a certain location will imply that said person is a "regular" there, for example.
vyrotek
Its great to see someone else is thinking about this. We actually started building a Badge repository service last year. - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795952 (KaBadge.com)

We have since also built a rule engine to allow sites to create badges and award them based on specific combinations of events. (You won't find it on KaBadge, we have been playing a new domain, expect a post Monday asking for a review!)

The biggest reason we created the rule engine was because people felt that the best area to create value. People commented about why would a site want to share their badges when they did all the hard to work figure out how to award them.

I'm excited to see others noticing the growing trend and benefit of achievement engines. There are problems to solve, but the trick is finding the ones that will make money :)

generalk
Excellent. I'll have to look into what you're doing and see if there's anything I can bring to the table, but either way, it is indeed awesome to see that my idea isn't completely without merit!
ryanelkins
The utility to having a central location for badges will be if you can find a way to establish virality. That would lead to new people wanting to earn these badges, which leads to directing traffic towards the company's site/application. A user being able to see all their badges in one place doesn't really provide much benefit for the company. If however, you can find a way to promote those companies through those badges (posting "User X just earned Badge Y on Site Z!" on Facebook, for example, then you might have something that someone would be willing to pay for.

It sounds like you don't plan on providing a service to actually determine when to award badges and are instead leaving that up to the companies themselves, so the above would be the only advantage to using the service that I can see. You have to think of "how does this benefit my customer ?"(in this case a site).