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Rate my product - mostrecent.net

2 points by typicaljoe ↗ HN
http://mostrecent.net/

My idea: to build a community of topical-hand-edited news pages. I want to start in the tech community working to recruit editors/experts to build pages covering programming languages and popular technologies. Think of it as an alternative to blogs, tweets, and social link sites. Here an expert can build out a page with the most useful links and highlight news items that he/she knows are important to the community. Everything is tabulated into one easy to scan page. This is all managed via a drop and drop interface.

The short intro video should give more context about how the site works:

http://mostrecent.net/help/introclip/

I'm just getting out of my "soft launch" phase and the JavaScript page I've built has already started making the rounds and gaining regular readers. It is a good example of what I'm going for:

http://mostrecent.net/javascript/

We are still in beta and more features are coming. My eventual business plan is to place ads on the pages with an aggressive editor rev share program. There are a number of pages at various levels of development on the site, but I know for a fact we still need pages covering ruby, java, flash, perl, lisp, tech startups, apple, c# and much more (in case anyone is interested).

Thanks for your time and attention! I look forward to your feedback.

3 comments

[ 1344 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] thread
pedalpete
First of all, I would recommend you spend a bit of time on design. The site is blinding. Maybe tone down your link colors a bit, or don't make them so huge.

I can't say I really understand the problem you are trying to solve. Why would I use mostrecent rather than delicious or squidoo or something else similar. It seems there is a ton of manual tasks required, I manually create links, manually drag them around, etc.

Your intro clip shows functionality (which is why it is under help), but you really need to explain why I would create these links. Why am I an editor, why I am doing this.

Tungle had a great demo (not sure if it is still around), and there was a group that is doing online merging of office and google docs, they also had a great demo video.

Look around and see what you can come up with.

This might be a great idea (it is a great domain name), but you haven't spelled out clearly enough what I would use it for/why it needs to exist.

typicaljoe
Yeah, the reason "why" is something I've struggled to communicate. The core idea is that if you personally are a power web user and are interested in a topic (let's say apple products) than you probably filter through a lot of feeds, videos, news stories, social links, etc. Much of that content isn't worth paying attention to, but some of it is gold. If you could find the apple "gold" and put it on one page it would be a very valuable and useful page. Consider the fact that any time an Apple story breaks all the major tech blogs fill up with posts and commentary. Little of that commentary is original or useful, but some of it is. If you regularly filter the Apple news feeds to find the good stuff then creating a page to highlight this information would be very useful to folks who don't want to do the same filtering.
pedalpete
I agree with that statement, but isn't that what social news sites like this one are for? A group of people with common interest does the filtering for you (also kinda what Squidoo is for if I've got them right).

If I were you, I'd keep refining your idea. I don't personally don't think you've hit the sweet-spot yet.