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Ask HN: Review my startup - findAlong.com

21 points by usaif ↗ HN
http://www.findAlong.com.

Often people work in teams to find information on the Web e.g. team of students working on a class project, members of a research group writing a paper, geographically distributed teams of programmers searching for help on forums, corporate research departments writing market surveys or reports, online shopping with family or planning a trip with friends. Typically people collaborate via ad-hoc means, such as sharing links over email or IM, or sharing tags on social bookmarking services.

FindAlong.com is a firefox plugin that enables teams of people to search together. You can start a "search session" with your team and start adding pages. Everyone is kept notified in real-time about searches performed by others in the group, pages added by a team member, comments on pages added by others, instant messages to team members etc. When "labels" are enabled within a session, each added page is automatically tagged with the query against which the page was added (avoiding duplication of work within team members) and helping organize the information.

You can also use the findAlong "search sessions" to organize your own research (and don't want to keep tagging each page with the same tag-name or invent awkward naming conventions to store relationships between tagged pages). You can email your sessions to friends, access them from the findAlong website or even post them as a bundle on delicious.

We are still tinkering with the UI, but it'd be great if people here can try out the extension and give us some feedback. You can also write to me directly at umar@mit.edu.

Thanks, -Umar

9 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 32.3 ms ] thread
thorax
It took a little bit of looking through your tour before I really understood it's usefulness.

To help get it across, it might be useful to have something that highlights the value a tad more concisely on the front page, maybe "it's the buddy system for researching online" or something like that.

I have to run to mother's day fest, but I'll give it a shot later. Looks like it could be handy for some uses-- probably not for our team "searching for help on forums", but for long multi-page research collections.

iamcalledrob
Your user experience really needs some fixing up. I won't talk too much about your UI, because you said you're working on that, and it has HUGE flaws right now (you sign up and the first page you reach is like a void).

Your user should be guided through the experience of finding out about and beginning to use your product. The big "click me" button on each page should lead on naturally in every step.

Hire a copywriter and an experienced UI designer (not a "leet gfx" designer). I would say with 99% certainty that all of you working on this are programmers. It shows.

The experience has got too much friction. In fact, I didn't install your plugin in the end, which means you've failed for me. The "Download" button just dumps me at the "this webpage tried to install an application..." toolbar, and a login prompt.

Really, the big problem is.. it's a plugin.

Plugins can be great, when used correctly. My definition (please correct me) of correct use of a plugin is to enhance an experience. So, if a user wants a faster/more convenient experience, they can opt to install your software to do that.

Requiring a plugin to be installed causes a lot of friction in the user experience. I don't know much about your site, and you're asking me to install your software? I don't know you, I haven't used your service and I don't have a relationship with your service, so it's not something I will do.

And, even then, if I do install a plugin, I have to relaunch my browser (okay, not true for IE). Huge roadblock. I have loads of tabs open, maybe some streaming media going on, I don't want to lose all that.

What if i'm using a browser that doesn't support plugins, or I'm surfing from school/work (two of your IDEAL markets) and the system doesn't allow plugins to be installed (likely). Or (just checked) what if i'm using IE? No luck.

You could implement everything you want to do here with javascript. That is my recommendation. Sure, you can have a plugin to enhance your features, but make it something you find out about after you've signed up and tried it, otherwise people will feel like you're forcing plugins down their throat.

Excuse the lack of co-ordination, I wrote this post as ideas came to me.

I've dropped you an email too, if you want get more feedback.

ianbishop
I haven't gotten a chance to play around yet, but so far it seems like a good idea. One thing that I would suggest is that the left hand side of the main page is a little 'overwhelming'. Compared to the other two ('Share', 'Collaborate'), it is very busy with many pictures kind of stacked on top of each other. I just find it looks like the odd man out and doesn't match the theme of the other two.
JeremyChase
My first reaction to the site was "I have no clue what this is". Your tagline lets you know it has to do with search, but it isn't clear until you read everything on the page. I think the first page of the "Take a tour" explains it well in the first line.. If it were me I'd use something like this as your tagline: "Save and share your searches."

Jer

natch
I think this would be useful but I can count on one hand I've had to do something remotely approaching this. You might say: well, now that it's easier with this tool, maybe you'll do it more often. Well, maybe. It's true that there is a lot of pain associated with emailing documents and search results around. But how often will this be useful?
raptrex
I would not have known this was a Firefox plugin until I took the tour, you should include this on the front page. Also change "New User" to "Register", and make it look more like a link, right now it just looks like text
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usaif
Thanks for all the feedback folks! Please install the extension and try it out with your team/co-workers. Will love to get feedback on the extension.

Thanks, -Umar