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Ask HN: Our prototype: People real-time news. Would you use it?

3 points by mprovo1 ↗ HN
Our application would allow you to follow someone, say Barack Obama, and get all that is being said about him on the net, in real-time (mixing twitter & traditional news outlets). We have NLP algorithms that figure out the 2-3 most important people/organizations in any given article (we track both individuals and organizations such as sports teams and companies). A popular entity -- say Lindsay Lohan or Justin Bieber -- will get dozens of articles matched every day. We are currently tracking around 15,000 people and in addition to articles we also attach useful meta-data using freebase (picture, twitter & facebook account).

Our current vision is a place where you can follow both what people say and what others say about them. There would also be an automatically generated "profile" page for each individual and we are thinking of adding social features such as badges (yeah, I know everybody is doing it :), but for instance you could get badges as you read more news about someone, slowly becoming his or hers uber fan). Such badges could be displayed on the profile badge, rewarding people for being awesome fans. It could also be a place where you interact with the person, post messages, send tweets, rate up or down, etc.

Here's the link to our internal alpha prototype: journal.factyle.com. It's not ready for public consumption! Just to give you an idea!

We also released a few iphone apps to experiment with mobile -- check out our sports app for example: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sports-stalker/id382283655?mt=8.

Do you think it can work as a consumer product? Would you use it? Is it doomed?

Thank you so much!

4 comments

[ 9.2 ms ] story [ 24.6 ms ] thread
scrrr
I think this could be very useful. If not for the general public (except perhaps fans of celebrities) then at least for people that professionally need to keep track of them. Reporters, showbiz-professionals etc.

Also: I don't care (at all) about the badges but would be interested in it as a research tool. Furthermore I'd like to have a software like this that is not limited to people but also to concepts, ideas and topics in general.

For example I'd like to be kept up to date on subjects like "Life on Mars" or "A.I.". Better than Google alerts and websites like HN already help me be it.

mprovo1
Thanks, I really like your idea of a product for professionals. It would definitely be useful for them. And tracking subjects is something we really want to do! Our first product was a "speedreader" bookmarklet that extracted the most important concepts of a webpage and generated a navigation tool that allowed you to scroll to them. Unfortunately, identifying important concepts in a document is a much harder problem than named-entities/organizations (but doable I think).
riffer
You need a differentiator. You've done a lot of work to get to this point, but why would somebody use this when they are used to going to Google News or TMZ or whatever? You have to create something that is extremely compelling in some dimension or another, otherwise it will be tough to rise above the noise. Best of luck.
mprovo1
Thanks, you're right that is the biggest problem we are currently facing. We seem to have good "retention" rate with our iphone apps (people who come back often to use the app), but our downloads are low. I must admit I'm not sure what we propose is compelling enough for people to change their news reading habits. Will people really come to us to consume news or will they simply google the people instead -- that we do not know yet.

I currently use the app to track my favorite hockey team and it works pretty well. I get all the signings / analysis / articles in almost real-time. I think it's definitely useful for sports -- but then again I could probably get such news through team-specific rss feeds.