HN Explorer

What delicious would be today if Yahoo didn't buy it

34 points by nicoslepicos ↗ HN
We've built a product called The Shared Web - the best way to discover amazing content based on your interests, and the people you care about (the friends and experts you follow). We realized we're all seeing lots of amazing content, and increasingly having social experiences around that content every day - so we wanted to build a product that really reflected that - a place to discover cool content, and to comfortably share all of the interesting things you come across on the Internet.

We have many similarities to Reddit and HackerNews - except we are focused on people's real identities, and connections between their friends, and the experts in the topics they care about.

We are constantly tinkering with the formula of what makes something interesting - is it because it is controversial and there are many comments about it? Is it because a large number of people posted it too? Or is it enough that one of your friends, who is knowledgable about the topic, posted it? These are the questions that we are exploring and planning on answering by building The Shared Web.

But, there is something even more powerful that we realized as we were developing and using it. The sense of community and common context that is created when people that you know start seeing the same content as you. It makes for better conversations. That social engagement around content translates to discussions in different topics - it’s the evolution of old school forums. It’s a way to make sure that the people you care about see the things that you find interesting so you can discuss them, so you can interpret them, so you can develop closer relationships by having common experiences. That’s what we hope to achieve with TSW, creating stronger, more meaningful connections between people through the content that they enjoy together.

That’s our mission. That’s why we are building The Shared Web.

What do you think are the most interesting heuristics to decide whether content is interesting to you or not?

http://www.thesharedweb.com

We'd love to hear your thoughts, so please try out The Shared Web, tell us what you think help shape our vision.

24 comments

[ 18.0 ms ] story [ 1184 ms ] thread
kareemamin
Would love to discuss with you the heuristics that we are using in more detail and see what you think about them.
uwnav
super excited about this release!
ummerr
Wow, this sounds really promising. Definitely going to check it out!!
mlizoain
This is a fantastic concept! Good luck!
elmasry
Great idea! You should blog about the factors you are considering in deciding which items are more interesting and why.
danielreis86
This is exactly what I'm looking for: a content-sharing site that easy to use and doesn't look like a big mess.
mattRaoul
Yeah it looks awesome, and it's really helpful. It's already becoming a daily visit for me.
sygeek
Looks interesting. I'm wondering if it supports features like adding a set of sites and ask the application to select featured/interesting articles between them.
kareemamin
This is a feature that we've been thinking about -> related articles, we haven't implemented it yet. Are you thinking you would post a few sites that you like and get similar articles based on those topics and those articles?
icepotato
i've been using this for a while, stepping into it whenever HN + RSS + twitter fails me. it's p good at pushing stuff I wouldn't normally read onto my lap, but right now there aren't a ton of gamers on it and that's like 80% of my desired reading material :)
nicoslepicos
Thanks for trying it for the last little while :). Glad you're finding some useful content. The gamer demographic hasn't come on to it yet in a big way.

It'll be interesting to see how it can handle having lots of different groups of people on the system (i.e. you should essentially have a sort of HN for each topic you're interested in).

I'm curious - did you connect your twitter account when you signed up?

icepotato
yup. but instead of posting things to TSW i post things to twitter and TSW doesn't really acknowledge that as something I have "shared". even though, you know, I've shared it. Just on twitter, where my friends are and a blogger plugin picks up my posts for republishing on my blog, and not on TSW where.... you guys are :)

similarly, when I go to TSW I have to skip all the stuff that I just read in twitter.

derpaderp
Is this a spam post? I can't tell. The comments all look like spam, dropping weird praise for this half baked reddit/hn clone.
nicoslepicos
Hey - it's not a spam post.

Curious why you think it's half-baked. Would love some feedback on how you think we could make it better!

derpaderp
This entire post and thread looks like a coordinated social media campaign.
sbierwagen
Well, you don't tell us how it is at all different from other social link sharing sites. (Digg, reddit, postrank, the social bits in google reader, facebook, delicious, etc etc etc)

That and the comments in the post are really bizarrely positive, all from accounts that are either brand new and have exactly one comment to their name... or are old and have exactly one comment to their name. Organic HN comments tend to be either neutral, relating solely to the technical merits of the article; or strongly negative, relating to the technical merits of the article.

In contrast, this post has a cheering section. Suspicious...

kareemamin
It's very similar to Hacker News but you use your real identity and there are many topics. You subscribe to the topics that you care about and things bubble up based on whether you follow the people who posted them or not.

That way you get content from the people that you care about but you also get content that the crowd cares about as long as it is in a topic that you follow. You get both the socially relevant content and the top crowdsourced content.

nicoslepicos
Yah - just to follow up on what Kareem said, you could imagine sharing tons of programming links on The Shared Web - and it would never bubble up for all your friends who don't follow programming, but for those of your friends who are interested in it - they would get it.

You as a reader of content also get a wider variety of content - and you're encouraged to post as much as you want, and repost lots of content (as that helps us pick out the good content from the bad), and we have various techniques to avoid duplicate posts at the same time. (A Repost counts like an upvote essentially)

In terms of the cheering section, we did mention to friends that we put this up on HackerNews, and to give a shout out if they like the site. Those people in the comments are all real people, who do actually log in daily, and like the site.

We really just wanted to get the word out to the HN community and to get feedback on what works and what doesn't.

kareemamin
Hey Derpaderp. It's not spam a few of the comments are from friends of ours and early users that have been using it for a while and enjoy it, that's where the praise is coming from. Would love to know what you think can be improved?
agoldh
I'll try it but im not sure about it...