Lovely drag/drop bookmarklet tutorial w/ animated arrow and helpful prompts and everything.
Though, really, I would like to try the service out without having to drag/drop a bookmarklet and then going off to another website and then clicking tl;dr. Can't I just put in a URL to try it out? Or provide a demo URL for us to try out?
It is not yet possible to try the service without the bookmarklet, but here is an example of a summary we created for the video of Anders Hejlsberg on Typescript that is on the frontpage so that you can see what it looks like : http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506aee4ec8f814a2370004fa
For me, the bookmarklet tutorial pointed the arrow at the address bar and then congratulated me when I overwrote the page's URL with javascript by dropping the button. (Firefox 15.0.1 on Linux). But I do like the idea!
I bounced without trying it because I couldn't figure out what it was going to actually give me. I would have been more likely to sign up or drag the button to my toolbar if you gave me a sample of what value I would get out of it.
Exactly. Especially if a site wants to get a permanent spot in my browser, it must demonstrate its value upfront. And without some good examples this is not going to happen.
That's a good idea! Have you thought about making Chrome/Firefox extensions as well to interface with your service? I feel like the extensions would be more integrated and provide a better user experience. I would use this service if an extension notified me that the article had been "tldr'd. Having to remember to click it is inconvenient and I will probably forget.
Overall though, it's a really good idea and I am interested to see how you flesh it out.
Hey, cofounder here. Thanks for the feedback, you are totally right the bookmarklet is a first prototype to gauge interest for the product. We will package it as browser extensions for the reasons you mentioned and other awesome ideas that we have in stock.
You might want to put a list of the day's top tl;drs on your landing page, or def. under "want some". When you roll over the title of the story, you get a floating tl;dr.
This would encourage skeptical users to do what you want them to do (drag that link up to the toolbar).
Thanks!
3rd cofounder here.
This is something we are indeed working on, but we put off the launch for too long already and really wanted to get feedback. You're right though that discoverability isn't great as it is.
Try it on most links here on the HN frontpage though, we're doing them for you today!
Onboarding process was awesome and effective. I went to the site meaning to just check it out but the process was almost too easy and now I have the tldr bookmarklet just sitting there on my toolbar.
Also I love the hover feature on the bookmarklet when you first see it.
Indeed the philosophy is close to gis.to: having humans, and not computers, write summaries. There are some key differences though, mainly the bookmarklet which enables you to create a summary of the webpage you're on without having to leave it. Also, I am under the impression that gis.to is not active anymore, the latest summary dates back to January, correct me if I'm wrong ?
This is great! Love the cute effect when dragging! I think the content of TL;DR should be in Wiki a'la StackOverflow, so people can refine it together. And probably showing a couple, not just one, as TL;DR can be very opinionated. And/or show if the TL;DR is written by the content owner to give "authoritative" feeling. Anyway I understand if it's too much then it won't be "TL;DR" anymore, so you must find the balance.
Hi, thanks for the feedback we're glad you like it!
To answer your questions:
- all tldrs are editable by users, so that the content can be refined by the community.
- we feel that tl;drs should convey the message and tone of the author of the underlying resource and as such shouldn't be opinionated.
- we would love to help content owners author, spread and control tl;drs of their content. If a content owner here is interested in talking with us about such opportunities, please contact us on twitter or by email
Hi, this is strange as we followed the html5 boilerplate way of detecting IE. We will look into the matter, thanks for the feedback.
As a sidenote, our site isn't optimized for mobile (to put it mildly) so I recommend trying it on a computer.
Cofounder here, thanks for your feedback! This is indeed an early version, and to answer your points more precisely:
- This is indeed planned, and as you can see in the comments you're not the only one thinking that! It cannot be done with a bookmarklet but we will release Chrome and Firefox extensions that will have this feature.
- I don't get what you mean by "something sidebar-like", are you talking of a pannel on the top of your screen automatically displaying the summary if it exists?
- Yep, building an active community around tldr.io will likely be key to its success. We are thinking hard on how to do it, and if you have any ideas or suggestion they are more than welcome
Forget about the sidebar. I thought it was a good idea , but it isn't.
Regarding the community, It wasn't in the line of "building a community as a key to success" but rather give profiles some more strength, use something karma-like to reward users who work, the ability to score TL;DRs and allow multiple per page, etc.
Yep, that is definitely planned. Especially a karma-like system to reward users who work. Since you're helping people by providing tldrs, we are thinking about the count of people who read tldrs you created, meaning the number of people you helped.
I really like the bookmarklet intro, but my concern with a bookmark is it's static. If it was an extension, it could change to show if there's already a tl;dr present.
The web is a big place, so realistically there will almost never be a tl;dr waiting, for at least the first year of this service, which means the bookmarklet is effectively a "create tl;dr" button.
That is true, and we are planning on making such an extension.
You are also right about the fact that the bookmarklet is currently a "create tl;dr" button, since we have so little of the web covered. For now we can provide you with tldrs this way:
- You can follow @tldrio on twitter or like the "tldr" page on facebook
- We are planning on summarizing all (at least most) of the articles from some well known blogs such as AVC and bothsidesofthetable
- We are thinking of a newsletter with the latest hot tldrs
- If you have any other ideas please share them !
Nice site, really nice UI with the arrow pointing to the bookmark bar. A change in the color of the tl;dr; bookmark when there's a bookmark available would really go a long way! Great job!
Thanks for the feedback! What you describe would be a big improvement but is not feasible with a bookmarklet. We are planning on releasing a browser extension that will enable just this.
Great UI! One cool idea could be to have automated summarizer snippets already on the page, and let the user edit those, or suggest those to the user. This would result in so much more content.
Thanks! We did consider to show an automated summary of any webpage that was not already summarized by a human, but our tests showed that our users prefer to summarize from scratch than from a computer-generated summary that's usually of very low quality.
This is really cool & solves a problem for me. I installed the bookmarklet and am looking forward to using it. I see that you are relying on the community to summarize pages & don't have a large enough data set built up yet.
What would be awesome is if you could somehow automate summarization using NLP. Check out condensr.com. They are able to summarize restaurant reviews...might not be at the same quality level as your current summaries but it came out of research from MIT & could be useful to you.
Hi, thanks a lot for the feedback! we're glad that we're solving a problem for you! You're right that we have little content for now, but we don't think NLP is the answer.
Humans are so much better than algorithms at summarizing content and we really want to focus on quality rather than quantity for now. We want to become a platform for the content that people deem worthy of being summarized and are hopeful that the overall quality will therefore be astounding. As such we are focusing on building a community of excited contributors.
I'll definitely checkout condensr.com to see if it can help at all though!
OK, I am going to add yet another appreciation (!) of the onboarding screen! The arrows and the wording were very persuasive in asking the user to install the bookmarklet. (well, it goes hand in hand with being French, no? ;-) )
The size of your tldr summary page was too long for my browser window (the share button was below, and I had to drag the window around to read the last few lines). My screen is 1366x768 in total (some of it is taken away by the taskbar)
I see you are relying on community feedback to grow the content. Hey, it seemed to work for Quora. So, perhaps it will work for you too. Your frontend looks better to gis.to (they do summat similar thing, yes?)
I might sign-up and add a few summaries later on. I also second some of the ideas that others mention:
- Notify users about some of the tldrs that were curated on a given day.
- on landing on a page, the bookmarklet/extension will notify if tldr exists
- sidebar/community integration
I am sure, you all have tons of other/better ideas too. :)
All the best and Good Luck!
EDIT: OK, I noticed that gis.to was mentioned already and also read your response.
Interesting idea. Would love to know how you guys will tackle the tl;dr generation issue—how to incentivize people to contribute, etc.
This is definitely a very interesting space. We ARE moving towards bite-sized pieces of information anyways, and you guys seem to be riding on this trend.
Best of luck, and looking forward to how this will turn out!
Slight tangent, there was a kid (maybe 15?) a while back doing an automated content summariser for mobile and he was all over the tech sites for being incredible after getting an investment, but I can't for the life of me remember the name and I want to see his project again. Does anyone recall his name or the company? All I can remember is a chinese (maybe russian) firm invested in him and he was young.
edit: found it! "Summly", looks like their site is down :(
Yep, the kid is named Nick d'Aloisio. We think his take on the problem is interesting but we believe algorithmic summarization will not be able to produce summaries that are good enough.
He says he is currently working in stealth mode and will launch a product soon, and you can be sure we will be among the first to test it to see if our hypothesis is correct :)
If you want to play with automated summarization yourself, check out the libots library. It's neat to play with, but the quality of the results varies pretty widely.
well we could talk about it! No particular reason, we're not developers/designers by trade, we have a generalist engineering background and we wanted to do a startup so we just went with what was buzzing at the time and learned everything from almost scratch. (could definitely be that it wasn't the smartest technical choices but since we've been handling the HN spike on our 20$/month linode VPS pretty handsomely so far we must be doing something right)
As a user, how do I know that the summary I'm reading is an accurate reflection of the article? Do you have any plans to validate the tl;dr entries? Have you thought about a rating system to allow users to rate the tl;dr entries?
For now, you have to trust us ;) But yeah we obviously have things (votes, endorsements, verified badges and the likes) planned to ensure the tl;drs reflect the underlying article accurately. It is a first world problem for now though.
I'd have read the description of the tool, thought 'eh, cool', and clicked away if it weren't for the absurdly cute instructions for installing the bookmarklet. Probably one of the best, tongue-in-cheek pieces of tutorial I've seen in a while.
hehe glad we could make you smile! We put a lot of work into it. We thought it would be hard to convince people to install it otherwise as it is sort of a technical abstract conceptual thing for now so we added humor :)
Good luck with the site. I had a similar idea, also implemented as a bookmarklet (here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2909309 which later mutated to http://noteplz.com/). Maybe the signup requirement is an overkill, wiki-style voting might work just as well.
110 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadThough, really, I would like to try the service out without having to drag/drop a bookmarklet and then going off to another website and then clicking tl;dr. Can't I just put in a URL to try it out? Or provide a demo URL for us to try out?
It is not yet possible to try the service without the bookmarklet, but here is an example of a summary we created for the video of Anders Hejlsberg on Typescript that is on the frontpage so that you can see what it looks like : http://api.tldr.io/tldrs/506aee4ec8f814a2370004fa
Thanks for the feedback!
http://tldr.io/iframe/iframe.html?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogmaver...
I had the same feeling, but then I clicked tl;dr on the page where they show you how to add the bookmarklet !
A demo without having to login/install anything extra would be nice.
It should automatically stick the tldr on the page if I installed the bookmark, and a tldr exists.
Overall though, it's a really good idea and I am interested to see how you flesh it out.
You might want to put a list of the day's top tl;drs on your landing page, or def. under "want some". When you roll over the title of the story, you get a floating tl;dr.
This would encourage skeptical users to do what you want them to do (drag that link up to the toolbar).
Also I love the hover feature on the bookmarklet when you first see it.
By the way, a slightly more elaborated version would be much appreciated. I'm thinking of
- A button/notification which changes color when there is a TL;DR available
- Something sidebar-like
- Better community integration
- This is indeed planned, and as you can see in the comments you're not the only one thinking that! It cannot be done with a bookmarklet but we will release Chrome and Firefox extensions that will have this feature.
- I don't get what you mean by "something sidebar-like", are you talking of a pannel on the top of your screen automatically displaying the summary if it exists?
- Yep, building an active community around tldr.io will likely be key to its success. We are thinking hard on how to do it, and if you have any ideas or suggestion they are more than welcome
Regarding the community, It wasn't in the line of "building a community as a key to success" but rather give profiles some more strength, use something karma-like to reward users who work, the ability to score TL;DRs and allow multiple per page, etc.
The web is a big place, so realistically there will almost never be a tl;dr waiting, for at least the first year of this service, which means the bookmarklet is effectively a "create tl;dr" button.
You are also right about the fact that the bookmarklet is currently a "create tl;dr" button, since we have so little of the web covered. For now we can provide you with tldrs this way: - You can follow @tldrio on twitter or like the "tldr" page on facebook - We are planning on summarizing all (at least most) of the articles from some well known blogs such as AVC and bothsidesofthetable - We are thinking of a newsletter with the latest hot tldrs - If you have any other ideas please share them !
What would be awesome is if you could somehow automate summarization using NLP. Check out condensr.com. They are able to summarize restaurant reviews...might not be at the same quality level as your current summaries but it came out of research from MIT & could be useful to you.
Humans are so much better than algorithms at summarizing content and we really want to focus on quality rather than quantity for now. We want to become a platform for the content that people deem worthy of being summarized and are hopeful that the overall quality will therefore be astounding. As such we are focusing on building a community of excited contributors.
I'll definitely checkout condensr.com to see if it can help at all though!
The size of your tldr summary page was too long for my browser window (the share button was below, and I had to drag the window around to read the last few lines). My screen is 1366x768 in total (some of it is taken away by the taskbar)
I see you are relying on community feedback to grow the content. Hey, it seemed to work for Quora. So, perhaps it will work for you too. Your frontend looks better to gis.to (they do summat similar thing, yes?)
I might sign-up and add a few summaries later on. I also second some of the ideas that others mention:
- Notify users about some of the tldrs that were curated on a given day.
- on landing on a page, the bookmarklet/extension will notify if tldr exists
- sidebar/community integration
I am sure, you all have tons of other/better ideas too. :)
All the best and Good Luck!
EDIT: OK, I noticed that gis.to was mentioned already and also read your response.
This is definitely a very interesting space. We ARE moving towards bite-sized pieces of information anyways, and you guys seem to be riding on this trend.
Best of luck, and looking forward to how this will turn out!
edit: found it! "Summly", looks like their site is down :(
He says he is currently working in stealth mode and will launch a product soon, and you can be sure we will be among the first to test it to see if our hypothesis is correct :)
Any particular reason you guys went with Express/Mongo?
Your tutorial made me smile! How rare is that?
Given that the majority of sites will not likely have a tl;dr I am unlikely to click the bookmarklet every time I open a web page.