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Show HN: Thread.ly - a news reading and sharing app (feedback appreciated) (thread.ly)

20 points by eekfuh ↗ HN
I built this app because I really enjoyed "Pulse" but I felt it lacked a few things. I wanted a web-based version, I wanted my news articles grouped together by topic, and I wanted an easy way to share with other people.

It is early in the site's life, so somethings are missing, including the critical mobile app. If you have any feedback to give, it would be appreciated!

7 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] thread
nategraves
I like it. I see that it scales down nicely, but I wish that it used media queries so that it would be more appropriately sized on a mobile device. As is, it looks like a promising alternative to something like Pulse.
jkaljundi
Nice to see some similarities to what we have done at http://utopic.me/

The news board seemed 80% from one source, BBC. Would love to see more variety. Did not really understand your rating algorithms there. Clicking on the news opened just 1 sentence of the news item. Either redirect to the full webpage or use full text scraping like Flipboard/Zite do (keeping of course copyright in mind).

Some objects you have don´t have photos and then the headline jumps to the top of the object, which is distracting.

After registering, I now have just an empty page under my first board, saying no threads found. Not sure what I should do next.

Good luck - better (big data) content discovery & personalization projects are always needed. And try to find a specific niche - it´s a very tough and coverrowded market.

eekfuh
Most of the content from the site is from RSS feeds. This is why there are lot of descriptions that are short. Hopefully users will add stuff and I can wean the site off this automatically submitted content.

After you register, you create a board or two, follow some users or sources in those boards. Make a tech board, with the sites you like. Make a friends one following all of your friends. But, you are absolutely right. I am not showing the user that they need to do this. This is probably the hardest thing to do, for me, right now.

sage
It wasn't clear to me how to add sources not already listed. Is there some way to add other RSS feeds?
xtacy
The website doesn't work on Firefox 9.0a1 (2011-09-24). Is it something wrong with my setup? (I use AdBlockPlus + Ghostery)

EDIT: The website looks beautiful on Chrome! What tools did you use?

eekfuh
Odd that it doesn't work in FF 9.0. There aren't any ads. Shouldn't be any JS errors either.

The technology behind the scenes is pretty simple. PHP + MySQL + Redis. Front-end is MooTools and I use Sass to generate my CSS. I have some cron's running to migrate newly added content to AWS/CloudFront. Certain data is cached via Redis and soon, almost all of it will be in the cache.

SoftwarePatent
The name is similar to Threadsy, a funded startup.

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/threadsy

When I worked at Big Generic Company with a firewall blocking gmail, threadsy still worked. So I set up an account with only gmail and could use gmail in my browser. Seemed less likely to get me in trouble than installing Tor.