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HNRFS: Help me help you; whats missing from your day?

13 points by dzlobin ↗ HN
Greetings chaps, Going along with YC's RFS series, I'd love to know what you guys think is missing from your daily routine. Regardless if it is at your job, startup, personal life; what kind of service/website/app would help with this? That said, feel free to leave any ideas you might also have.

12 comments

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hajrice
* Billing system? Though Chargify.com isn't doing a bad job.

* We hate chatting via IM and tried Highrise, it isn't for us. I guess that could be a starting point ?

gridspy
* Have you tried (http://recurly.com/) or (https://cheddargetter.com/features) ?

* Have you tried Campfire? What more do you want from your chats?

jsatok
I'm also looking for a better chat platform for my team. We've been using a Skype group chat for the last 8 months (there's just three of us, so it's not SO bad).

I'm trying to find a chat platform (either native mac based or web app) that keeps really good chat logs.

Any suggestions?

EDIT: Do you know what kind of logs Campfire keeps, and how long it keeps them for?

gridspy
Downloadable, searchable daily chat logs. It also allows you to upload attachments and lists those next to the daily chat logs. Navigating the raw text logs isn't that great, but it keeps them forever.

I find the search really useful to pull out tidbits of information we discuss, phone numbers, ideas, command lines, etc.

I'm still on the free plan.

tptacek
Campfire has extremely good searchable chat logs, which are a single click away from any chat room. It has good authorization controls on chat rooms and access to transcripts. It associates uploaded files to transcripts, and has very good UI for finding files across transcripts. Finally, it has a solid HTTP API, which we've used to put chatbots for commits and such on channels. I recommend it.
gridspy
My immediate thought : HN readers are mostly highly informed hackers. If there is an obvious product need to satisfy us, we would have already created it.

I'd turn my attention to those who don't frequent online discussion forums such as this.

dzlobin
>> "If there is an obvious product need to satisfy us, we would have already created it." Although you're generally right. I'd have to say if startup founders are working almost around the clock, and said product would take longer than 100 lines of code, there's a good chance that it's a project being worked on in someone's spare time or the idea has been left behind entirely. That said, I haven't exactly seen an example of either yet. I'm just trying to get a bit of feedback from the HN crowd, even though as you said, it's a longshot.
bmr
Hackers have now solved every problem they face? None left? This sort of awe-of-our-own-brilliance seems more likely to retard the progress of this community than advance it.
gridspy
Er...

Not exactly.

My point was more that you will find a lot more fresh ground if you look farther afield.

Of course, there are a lot of great apps like Twilio that are concieved to make developer's lives a great deal easier - so I dunno.

thirdusername
Random thoughts I've had that I'm probably never going to get around to doing:

* Something that will let me automatically backup all my data that is on various services like Facebook, Youtube, Hacker News etc.

* An app that will join and make all my IM logs searchable from trillian, meebo, regular MSN, Skype etc. that I have lying around everywhere. It should let me join logs and people across different services and users on the same service.

* A conference and event directory that will alert me about interesting things happening close to me.

* Something that will let me filter my newsfeeds easier. For example I don't want to be linked things more than once, even from different sources and I want to be able to query say delicious for tags on a hacker news post and filter out things I'm not interested in based on that. I would also like to be able to filter out HN posts that are below a certain number of up votes and maybe put a days delay on when they show up in my feedreader so there will be comments.

* A things I read and watch, scrobbler.