it's a new site to meet people with similar interests. http://www.GetToLike,me - it's not explicitly a dating site, but I figure the environment will be similar.
Great site. I used to own audiolizer.com that did the same thing but with less features.
One thing that worked out really well for us was allowing users to import their itunes libraries/playlists. You just need to parse the iTunes XML and map them title/artists to YouTube videos and users would be able to import thousands of songs in seconds.
A few questions:
- How do you plan to make money?
- With YouTubes new song filtering, a lot of songs aren't the original pitch anymore- how do you deal with that?
Good point. I actually added that in because I initially wanted to allow users to select which profile picture they wanted to use. But I decided to drop that feature for the MVP. I've updated the FB permission request.
Yeah, there was actually an article on this - I'll see if I can dig it up later.
It evaluated the performance between asking them to refer right after sign-up vs. after they have tried the product for a while.
The message we currently use is something along the lines of "Now that you have a brand new link blog, it's time to get an audience", or something like that.
- On Facebook, I am limited to sharing with people in my network. There is rarely any discussion other then "haha" or "that is so cool!". On Howl, everything is public, and your audience is everyone.
- The posting process as well as the way content is presented on Howl is customized for links. Posting a link is as simple as pasting a URL. Also, the way content is displayed makes a huge difference in terms of user experience when compared to share-everything services like Tumblr.
- From the POV of someone consuming content, when I come to Howl I know what I am going to get. Links to interesting websites, articles, videos, images. On FB/Tumblr you get a mixed bag of all sorts of content (rants, pictures, quotes, personal stories, etc.).
If I were to compare it to other services out there, I would say we are most similar to delicious. However, we are aiming to be more social, with more consumable content (vs just a list of bookmarks). If you asked me this question a month ago, I would have given you a different answer - a sign that we are still evolving, I guess.
1) I tend to agree with you. There is a lot of text, especially on the homepage. We'll work on cleaning that up.
2) Howl is focused on sharing links. I use the services you mentioned, as well as Facebook. And although I can share links on these services, Howl is quite a different experience. Perhaps this is a sign that we need to describe ourselves better.
You need to launch - now. I was in a similar position a few years ago with one of my first startups. We spent months on development even though we had a usable product done very quickly. We analyzed our competitors, and constantly tried to one-up them while hiding in stealth mode. We were never completely happy with the product, as it seemed to always be missing some feature. Feature creep hit, and we spent another few months developing.
This proved to be a big mistake. The problem here is that we tried to predict how our users would use our product, wasting tons of time developing features we thought potential users would like (we didn't have any actual users at this point). This took our product in the wrong direction - when we launched it seemed users didn't use it the way we intended - most of the features were never used.
In hindsight, instead of spending time predicting and implementing features that would never be used, we should have just launched the product and evolved the way users ACTUALLY use it.
Hi JoshCole, thanks your feedback. You are thinking along the exact same lines as us. Your suggestion is on our todo list, and the latest post/users are just a filler as we have not gotten around to implement a recommendation system yet.
But we plan to utilize a users posts, the people who they are subscribed to, and the posts of the people they are subscribed to in order to serve more relevant content.
I guess it really depends on how you learn, but IMO you should avoid buying a textbook. There are plenty of resources online and often they come with "real" examples from users, etc.
My advice would be to just do it! Think of a project you want to do and start playing around. Start hacking, make it work, iterate. Later on, if you find something you did isn't the best way to do it - go back and rewrite it. You will learn a great deal from your mistakes - I know it was the best way I learned things.
You said you are interested in developing a website - start with HTML/CSS and PHP. There are TONS of php resources online, it is a powerful language, and quite easy to learn.
Good luck and be sure to post back when your product is launched :)
Great ideas - added them to our ideas document. Building out these sort of specific features around link sharing is how we are going to differentiate ourselves from FB, Digg, etc.
1) Yep, still a really early version of our product and we havn't implemented the location yet.
2) Thanks, will look into that now.
3) Our service is more personal than Digg. Digg is all about getting voted up by the community to be seen. Ours is more of a personal sharing thing, where you'd follow people that interest you, and post things that interest you to build your own followers (twitter). You'd get new posts from your stream. We are highly influenced by facebook links, but FB links is limited because its only reaches your friend circle, and can disasppear in the feed stream. And link sharing isn't FB's main focus, but it will be ours.
This is actually something we've been juggling with for the past few days. We like how it is quick and easy (1 click) to post a link, but as you mentioned, requires more work if the user is not happy with it.
Haha, actually, these are still features we are working on as we speak! Not sure if this was mentioned yet, but the product is far from ready. But seeing as how HN is about startups/development, we thought we would get some really early comments and suggestions :)