Your spot on about the UI/UE, it is a serious weak point. It is a pretty big gap in my own skill set (which by iterating on this site, I am hoping to improve).
I think the core competency of the site is meme tracking for a given vertical category. Given that, the thought is additional features can be added that leverage the memes.
Some examples I am thinking of short term:
-Which memes are having the biggest impact on social networks (in terms of "tweets", "likes", "diggs", etc..).
-What media, such as videos and images, are associated with a particular meme.
Longer term:
-Given a list of sites and article I track on say, Google Reader, only show me the entries which are part of significant memes.
-What memes are my friends "liking", "tweeting", or "digging", etc...
-Topic search which returns memes rather than single articles.
The overarching plan is to release early, and often -- and hopefully to update the folks here at Hacker News to make a good feedback loop.
You have some good thoughts on it, and your plan to get input is great. But, I think you need to continue thinking outside of the box on this.
What you are saying you want it to do is the cliche of existing sites out there that do social link promotion or link/news aggregation (regardless of whether there is a great logic to how you are pulling those stories, etc.). There is no value add significant enough in anything you are listing there to make me want to visit the site at all, much less with any frequency.
You need something significantly new or niche about the site. If you are looking for a challenge, surprise me (and everyone else) and come up with an idea that I'd be interested in that I've not heard before. I know this sounds harsh, but better now than later.
Comments
Thanks for the great feedback.
Your spot on about the UI/UE, it is a serious weak point. It is a pretty big gap in my own skill set (which by iterating on this site, I am hoping to improve).
I think the core competency of the site is meme tracking for a given vertical category. Given that, the thought is additional features can be added that leverage the memes.
Some examples I am thinking of short term:
-Which memes are having the biggest impact on social networks (in terms of "tweets", "likes", "diggs", etc..).
-What media, such as videos and images, are associated with a particular meme.
Longer term:
-Given a list of sites and article I track on say, Google Reader, only show me the entries which are part of significant memes.
-What memes are my friends "liking", "tweeting", or "digging", etc...
-Topic search which returns memes rather than single articles.
The overarching plan is to release early, and often -- and hopefully to update the folks here at Hacker News to make a good feedback loop.
Thanks!
You have some good thoughts on it, and your plan to get input is great. But, I think you need to continue thinking outside of the box on this.
What you are saying you want it to do is the cliche of existing sites out there that do social link promotion or link/news aggregation (regardless of whether there is a great logic to how you are pulling those stories, etc.). There is no value add significant enough in anything you are listing there to make me want to visit the site at all, much less with any frequency.
You need something significantly new or niche about the site. If you are looking for a challenge, surprise me (and everyone else) and come up with an idea that I'd be interested in that I've not heard before. I know this sounds harsh, but better now than later.