I created trending news aggregation service called TOP.ST. Ratings are based on people's social network activity and updates in real-time. At the moment the service works in 29 countries. More countries are coming in future.
In next updates I planning to add news categories and thinking about e-mail digest.
I'm looking for a feedback. Feel free to ask me any questions here or by e-mail: mail@top.st
It looks good and seems to capture the vibe of the moment well.
Any details on how it works? Which networks do you monitor? Is it just Twitter? How do you know where people are from? Do you go by language? Only take into account tweets with geo information?
Checkout buzzsumo.com and a free version that we built wordlink.com. It gathers all the news in the world (mostly) then sorts it by its aggregated social activity. Likes shares comments tweets pins upvotes, on facebook twitter linkedin google plus reddit pinterest etc...
It's also a search engine used by marketing companies to analyze the news. Scrapy twisted python crawlers and elasticsearch backend for indexing.
I monitoring 7 networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn for the World and VK, Odnoklassniki for Russia. GEO targeting by source popularity in country.
Not OP but I'll hazard a guess it looks for URLs which appear at an accelerating rate on Twitter, using a whitelist of domain sources (since we see several frequent domains).
One feedback is I'd avoid the animation effect until the user has been idle for a few seconds.
Excellent idea about waiting for idle to update ratings. I thought a lot about how to prevent changes while user scrolling the list. At this moment user have a pause button, to do it manually, but your suggestion looks more useful. Thanks!
Yes, I agree it would be a great feature. But it looks like that I need some more knowledge in machine-learning, to do this job well. Maybe in future I will be able to do it.
There is no API right now, but i'm thinking about it. Because the service is free for users, free for sources, and free from ads, I thinking about data-mining as monetization method.
A POST request to https://top.st/top/1/GB is good enough for my needs. Can you email me commercials if you would allow me to do so (email in my profile).
This API intended for internal use only and not allowed to use outside top.st and it can be changed at any moment. I hope you understand that i spending many resources to collect all of this data and keeping it actual in real time and it can't be free for use. But it's possible to create any API for your needs as a paid service. I'm planning to create complex data-mining service based on this data in future, but for now you can explain your needs and we can thinking about possible solutions together. Feel free to contact me by e-mail mail@top.st or my personal e-mail: vadimbaryshev@gmail.com
This is pretty cool. The one thing that i noticed is that there are a lot of 'duplicates', in the sense of one event being covered by a ton of different websites and then being shown multiple times.
I'm wondering if would be possible to use some sort of string pattern matching algorithm (perhaps bolstered by comparing article submission times?) to group 'like' stories together to mitigate this effect, perhaps allowing a the user to expand a given group to see all of the stories pertaining to that 'event' in order of popularity.
Very interesting! My only (design) suggestion: The H1 title looks like a logo. I'd add a logo there and move the H1 to somewhere more visible (At least for the first few months of the site)
Funny, a couple weeks ago we launched our Chrome extension that sends you a notification every time there is a top story on HN also called TOP. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653) :D
Thanks all for your replies. It's really very helpful. Unfortunately HN says that I commenting too fast. But I promise, that I reply for all questions as soon as possible.
In Belgium here, and somehow the website figured out I speak dutch (which is quite correct) and used i18n which I presume is written by a Frenchman studying medieval Dutch. So maybe allow me to switch to English i18n, like I always do, or look for a better translator for dutch.
Right now, the logo for example has 4 words and 2 grammar mistakes. So the use of dutch i18n is really bad if you want more users in the Netherlands.
Just a heads up. Looks very interesting otherwise, might use it as my landing page. I'm that kind of news-junkie.
What is the value in being so current? Unless you are doing HFT or disaster response, you probably want to get your news distilled, curated, in batch form, and aggregated over some time.
Looks cool. My one gripe: it looks like there's a footer when I switch between time intervals, but it's impossible to get to since the stories continue loading as I scroll down.
Bookmarked. This is a great website, simple design well executed, but I'll give you my gripes, too.
First thing I'd do? Get rid of the blurred background for readability's sake, it makes me feel like I've got glaucoma.
Also, I whitelist scripts and I'm oddly outraged when I land on a page which hardly functions without. At least tell me I have to enable JS. It's a minor thing but first impressions and all.
I'm intrinsically uncomfortable with websites moving without my say so but it may grow on me in this case (just don't over do it ;).
The only other thing that's grinding my gears is more general and counterintuitive. Namely, news being weighted toward what people want to read, rather than need to read.
However, I'm probably just being an idealist... after all, who doesn't need to see a raccoon riding an alligator?
Edit: Just found the pause button, it's a good compromise.
We built this 2 years ago and applied to Ycomb with no luck both years. Everyone we have uses it everyday but it's difficult to penetrate the publishing market. Still we work with large marketing firms to offer intelligence services.
Full text searchable http://wordlink.com and http://analytics.wordlink.com
40 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadI created trending news aggregation service called TOP.ST. Ratings are based on people's social network activity and updates in real-time. At the moment the service works in 29 countries. More countries are coming in future. In next updates I planning to add news categories and thinking about e-mail digest.
I'm looking for a feedback. Feel free to ask me any questions here or by e-mail: mail@top.st
Any details on how it works? Which networks do you monitor? Is it just Twitter? How do you know where people are from? Do you go by language? Only take into account tweets with geo information?
One feedback is I'd avoid the animation effect until the user has been idle for a few seconds.
Good concept though and good execution.
I'm wondering if would be possible to use some sort of string pattern matching algorithm (perhaps bolstered by comparing article submission times?) to group 'like' stories together to mitigate this effect, perhaps allowing a the user to expand a given group to see all of the stories pertaining to that 'event' in order of popularity.
* it would be nice to have a static <noscript> version, or at least a message asking to enable Javascript, rather that seeing the templates
* I was going to make a remark on the automatic updates, but I finally spotted the "pause "button; maybe make it a little more obvious?
Otherwise, the website looks really fast and neat and the country filter is very handy!
Funny, a couple weeks ago we launched our Chrome extension that sends you a notification every time there is a top story on HN also called TOP. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653) :D
I'm not interested in knowing whats trending today, but I don't want to be completely out of the loop either.
Or use any url from main page but replace the subdomain.
Right now, the logo for example has 4 words and 2 grammar mistakes. So the use of dutch i18n is really bad if you want more users in the Netherlands.
Just a heads up. Looks very interesting otherwise, might use it as my landing page. I'm that kind of news-junkie.
Where is the Sunday paper of the internet?
Edit: my bad, my focus was still on the country dropdown.
Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's not so much a black box.
First thing I'd do? Get rid of the blurred background for readability's sake, it makes me feel like I've got glaucoma.
Also, I whitelist scripts and I'm oddly outraged when I land on a page which hardly functions without. At least tell me I have to enable JS. It's a minor thing but first impressions and all.
I'm intrinsically uncomfortable with websites moving without my say so but it may grow on me in this case (just don't over do it ;).
The only other thing that's grinding my gears is more general and counterintuitive. Namely, news being weighted toward what people want to read, rather than need to read.
However, I'm probably just being an idealist... after all, who doesn't need to see a raccoon riding an alligator?
Edit: Just found the pause button, it's a good compromise.