HN Explorer

Ask HN: please review SmartPeople

38 points by ritonlajoie ↗ HN
Hi everyone,

I made a website that allows you to 'follow' any hacker-newser. I think such a service is needed, because this kind of great website is 'comment' centered.

The principle: you get an e-mail with the comment of your idol everytime he comments on HN (with a slight delay because I don't want to request the site too much). This will personally help me a lot to follow patio11 :)

Thanks for reviewing SmartPeople, and If in the near future you are still using it, you'll find out that I'm adding reddit and some other boards you may belong to.

Please allow a 30 min/one hour delay between the comment crawlings.

Site : http://nasr.ath.cx

Edit: my english...

53 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread
die_sekte
Chrome 5.0.375.125 on Mac Snow Leopard: Some kind of layout error. The right part doesn't float properly or something. I'm not sure what causes this.
jordanmessina
Is this what you're talking about? The layout is messed up for me in my manage area: http://twitpic.com/2cjzay
ritonlajoie
Thanks. I'm sorry the pictures seems to have been deleted. I don't have a mac, but will try to install Safari asap.

edit: It's back on twitpic! yay Ok ! Will have a look

andymoe
Sort of a creepy idea. But no more so than Facebook or twitter I guess. I long for the days when people, myself included, hid their real contact info and used a pseudonym.

edit: Also, the pencil's pixilation is distracting and I think you should get rid of the alpha effect that goes away when hovering over the logo. (Safari 5.0.1)

hugh3
Except that at least on facebook or twitter you know when someone is following you, and have the option to block them.
andymoe
On the other hand I don't think you should have any expectation of privacy in "public places" on the internet. That's just foolish.
ScotterC
Agreed. I recently decided to go all out and open on the Internet and embrace all that social networking has including some of the inherent creepiness. So far I've received little to zero odd encounters / phone calls / emails. It's kind of relieving actually but certainly blurs the line of where my Internet persona ends and my real privacy starts.
hugh3
Of course not, in the same way that you don't expect privacy when you're walking down the street.

On the other hand, if you find that someone is following you whenever you walk down the street, well, that's a little creepy.

fgf
I don't see this as creepy at all, have you never checked PGs latest comments or that of a commenter with interests/opinions you share?

anyway, thank you for making this!

ps. I'd prefer rss

ecaron
+1 for RSS, or better yet PubSubHubbub!
ritonlajoie
Sure, I'll try to add RSS in the weekend. Thanks for your kind words !
AgentConundrum
I don't see this as creepy at all. A lot of people posting here are smart folks with interesting ideas and unique insights, and I can see where a lot of people would want to "follow" certainly the more well-known and influential figures here.

You should know that anything you post here is public anyway, and HN makes it easy to get a digest of your comments anyway via your profile page. This is just an attempt to make the process easier - you save time by being alerted to comments rather than periodically checking for them.

Besides, reddit does something very similar already: reddit users can "friend" each other to highlight posts from people they like, and reddit user pages are rss-enabled. To my knowledge, there has been no backlash over this.

rick_2047
Well this is good but what I would really like (and was just thinking about since yesterday) would be the ability to follow a conversation. Some time on an article, the a particular thread starts to become much more interesting than the story itself. At those times (and it happens very often) I wish HN would allow me to "watch" that thread. Sure I can bookmark the link of the thread, but its just a pain to maintain that. And also I usually forget to open it again
vyrotek
And on top of this, I would love the ability to know which comments were added since the last time I viewed the thread. Sometimes posts like 'Review my app' get a lot of feedback and spawn multiple discussions, but I can't easily tell which were new comments from the last time I looked. I can only see that the 'comment count' increased.
johnwatson11218
Seems like I watched a demo of google wave online and it had stuff just like this. I thought that google wave would have been a perfect replacement for the threaded discussion model that we have here.

These discussions seemed too short lived for my taste. I know that many people come up with insightful observations after they think about an issue for a day or two. By then the story is off the front page and what is the use in making the comment?

rick_2047
These discussions seemed too short lived for my taste. I know that many people come up with insightful observations after they think about an issue for a day or two. By then the story is off the front page and what is the use in making the comment?

We really need to solve this. People have a tendency to comment only on things which are on front page. This is in part the fault of being karma centric and also the sheer volume of traffic.

whatusername
General web forum software (phpBB etc) all solve this - bumping the most recent commented piece to the top of the forum. Digg/Reddit/HN broke this mould,,
wvl
I found that frustrating as well, so I wrote a browser extension (available in Safari and Chrome) that highlights new comments:

http://hckrnews.com/about.html

ritonlajoie
Hi vyrotek, I just added this feature. Hope you'll like it!
ritonlajoie
Hi rick_2047, the feature is implemented now. There are many approaches to do that, I hope the one I choose is good enough : receive the latest comments only (not the entire threads with the new comments highlighteds). Hope you'll like it, and thanks for the support.
kashif
Well, I was designing something similar to make it easier to track submissions by people who I consider a good source of interesting articles. Unfortunately, what time of day you make a submission has a significant impact on whether it gets to the home page and from there into my reading diet. I don't enjoy all the content on the home page, and would rather read some submissions that have only a few votes but were made by members who are interested in the same subject as me.

So, a feature request, please add a way to follow submissions by specific people on the web not on email - an alternate home page, much like a twitter stream.

ritonlajoie
thanks for commenting. well,I'll trynto fit that in my todolist!thanks for the idea.
hotmind
Consider integrating Slashdot into your service. I love Slashdot, and the comments there are the best anywhere.
ritonlajoie
sure,I plan to have it.I am an avid reader of SDot!have you registered?that way you would receive email updates on improvepents!
itistoday
Nice idea!

I noticed though that you're including the user's password in the confirmation email. This isn't recommended for security reasons (as it's easy to intercept, and users often use the same password for multiple services). Also, I hope you're storing the salted hash of the password on your server (as opposed to the actual password).

ritonlajoie
thanks! i use drupal,the security is quitengood.in the db,a hash is stored,the only clear pass is in the mail.i ll try to change that,you are right.
KeithMajhor
It'd be really cool if you brought in the content of articles. That way you could follow real people outside of the Hacker News community (assuming that the content was posted on Hacker News). Then if a public figure like say, John Resig, made a post to his website I could get that in my feed as well.
ritonlajoie
Thanks, it's in my todo list :) Will keep you updated !
tnorthcutt
Just saw this, posted in a duplicate thread (why's there a duplicate...?) Reposting here: Nice idea. Haven't registered, so forgive the ignorant question, but are daily digest emails an option? If not, I'd suggest making them one. Also, suggested users to follow would be neat, similar to Amazon's "other people who bought x also bought y".
ritonlajoie
thanks for sharing you thougts.all of that is on my todo list.the thing is,i made that this afternoon in 2 hours..i didnt expect such a success ;)
ecaron
Given any thought to putting this on GitHub? I'd love to see OpenID support rolled in, but people posting "I want this" could put their money where their mouth is - by adding it themselves!

PS: Did we just talk recently about LinkUp.com?

troygoode
Great idea, I would contribute (or try - I have no actual Drupal experience).

I'd love to see a sorted list of the top N followed people. I imagine pg would be #1, but it very well could be patio11. Seeing #3-10 would be very interesting.

ritonlajoie
Well, I can tell you patio11 and pg are on the top list, but I don't have many users right now !
kyenneti
Great idea. Do you mind asking this - How are you managing your email delivery ? Are you using any email delivery networks or managing yourself. Congratulations on the launch.
ritonlajoie
Thanks !! I'm using a gmail account for now.
samratjp
Instead of email, I'd rather get growl or notifo like messages.
ritonlajoie
Hmm I never heard about those. Will have a look. I'm thinking of adding twitter. Say, you have a twitter account. You enter your twitter name in your profile info on PeopleSmart. You'll then receive notifications on Twitter (also, or only, as you wish). What do you think ?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[dead] samratjp
I'd rather not on twitter, that's just a waste of your twitter API calls limit and besides, I'd want this to be as non-intrusive as possible.

Growl is an OSX app with which you can get notifications from all your apps in one place. It's very flexible as in the API is quite good. As about notifo, it's the same concept as growl, but for the iPhone - and I dare you to find an easier to use API than notifo's (though I have no affiliation with them, but they've solved a very big problem of mine :)

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[dead] chbarts
I'd sooner we port one more feature form Reddit: The ability to know when someone has replied to one of your comments. This will make it much easier to carry on discussions, the main interest of this site, even when they're attached to old articles that most members have forgotten about. Otherwise you might as well be speaking into an empty room after a couple days, regardless of how enriching the conversation would have been.
ritonlajoie
I added the ability to follow a thread ! Thanks for testing !