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Ask HN: Please review my startup - techofnow

11 points by kakaylor ↗ HN
Hey everyone -- I wanted to run a project I have been working on for the last few months by the folks at Hacker News:

LINK: http://www.techofnow.com/

techofnow is an aggregator for technology memes -- similar to techmeme, although there are a few key differences. In particular, the method by which articles are clustered into memes and ranked is completely automated. This means an article which is considered important and promoted by an editor at techmeme may not be promoted on techofnow since it is not a significant meme.

A little background.

I started techofnow as a weekend project a few months ago after completing undergraduate (CS + Math) about a year ago. I thought building a meme aggregator would be a good challenge outside of work and graduate school to learn and maybe gain a little bootstrapped entrepreneurship experience.

Any feedback, thoughts, guidance, or criticism would be appreciated.

11 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 36.0 ms ] thread
znt
I'm a noob when it comes to web design, but I think you'd be much better if you converted "Discussion" links into expandable form. They take up too much space, if a visitor is really interested in the sources that mention the news, they can click on the discussions and see the results.

Other than that it's a good idea, why don't you add Monthly/Weekly The Most Popular memes?

andrewtbham
i agree the discussion links are consuming way too much real estate. if you reduce that you would have room for more stories.

right now the news seems a little google and android heavy.

however overall... it's pretty cool. i am going to bookmark it and check it periodically. do you have a plan to distinguish it more from techmeme?

jcroberts
Beautiful. Absolutely Beautiful.

It would be wonderful if it was implemented here on HN. Instead of having a page full of "Angel-Gate" stories, there would be only one, and it would include all the others. Similar for every other duplicate submission.

At the moment, I believe HN has a very much simplified and inaccurate version of this concept implemented. If an exact url is submitted a second time, the second is simply added as a "vote up" for the previous submission of the same thing.

logicb
Hi, I am sorry.. I didn't get the difference between Techmeme & techofnow. can you elaborate more? may be I am too used to techmeme that I was seeing whether the "+" symbol comes up before the dicussion section. Also, you can probably show few discussions and show a link as "more discussion on the same topic"
mahmud
He wrote that techofnow is completely automated, while, I am guessing, techmeme is crowd-sourced or somehow manually edited.

I think that's a good differentiating point.

FWIW, 10 out of 15 stories on the site is, as of now, about mobile technologies. Does techofnow need more diverse sources?

kakaylor
Right. The automation versus editing is the key difference between techofnow and techmeme. Techmeme has several editors that will promote stories, or alter conversation grouping, based on an editor's discretion.

I think your right. techofnow is too mobile heavy right now.

ma2rten
Actually to me it looks a lot like the tech/sci section of google news. I think in order to differentiate from them you need to add some more features, like tech related subcategories. Otherwise I would also look at them as a source of inspiration.
devmonk
Some thoughts:

- Domain/name sounds somewhat awkward, which is not good for a place to get news.

- favicon looks rough.

- The front page is unfortunately a wreck, UI/UE-wise.

-- Don't use scrollover/hover to highlight part of main page name like some exciting link when it is just a link back to the main page.

-- Remove "Top Technology Memes". You don't need it.

-- Reduce unimportant UI elements by removing the icon next to where the link goes to and the site where the link goes to above each headline.

-- Story title on one line, text on the next. Don't start text on the headline line.

-- Text should probably not be in black because it is competing with the headline being blue and standing out. Pick one or the other to stand out if you must have both. I think the headline by itself is enough.

-- Get rid of the myriad of links to all the sites it came from under the headline and text.

What you have left unfortunately is a lackluster list of headlines, but basically- that is the gist of what you are providing currently. If you are trying to be google news, have categories, etc.

Why not pull content into the page dynamically via Ajax pushing the headlines down as soon as they come in?

Think about this: what is the feature (not content) that will distinguish you from every other site like this on the web?

kakaylor
Thanks for the great feedback.

Your spot on about the UI/UE, it is a serious weak point. It is a pretty big gap in my own skill set (which by iterating on this site, I am hoping to improve).

I think the core competency of the site is meme tracking for a given vertical category. Given that, the thought is additional features can be added that leverage the memes.

Some examples I am thinking of short term:

-Which memes are having the biggest impact on social networks (in terms of "tweets", "likes", "diggs", etc..).

-What media, such as videos and images, are associated with a particular meme.

Longer term:

-Given a list of sites and article I track on say, Google Reader, only show me the entries which are part of significant memes.

-What memes are my friends "liking", "tweeting", or "digging", etc...

-Topic search which returns memes rather than single articles.

The overarching plan is to release early, and often -- and hopefully to update the folks here at Hacker News to make a good feedback loop.

devmonk
Thanks!

You have some good thoughts on it, and your plan to get input is great. But, I think you need to continue thinking outside of the box on this.

What you are saying you want it to do is the cliche of existing sites out there that do social link promotion or link/news aggregation (regardless of whether there is a great logic to how you are pulling those stories, etc.). There is no value add significant enough in anything you are listing there to make me want to visit the site at all, much less with any frequency.

You need something significantly new or niche about the site. If you are looking for a challenge, surprise me (and everyone else) and come up with an idea that I'd be interested in that I've not heard before. I know this sounds harsh, but better now than later.