Ask HN: Showing off customer feedback useful to you? (new from YC 07) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Showing off customer feedback useful to you? (new from YC 07)

habitstream.com

38 pointsrobfitz27 comments

Hey guys, we've been working with London's agencies for the last few months to develop Habit Stream, which help find the nice things people are saying about your business and then re-broadcast the best bits (customer tweets, press coverage, Amazon reviews, etc) through more scalable channels (like widgets & ads).

We've been getting a strong response from the agency side, but we're just starting to learn how we can best help startups, blogs, and small businesses. Basically, we think everyone should be able to benefit from the unsolicited testimonials that are popping up all over the web.

So, we would really love to hear your thoughts. It's all self-serve and there's a free trial. Thanks!

PS. You may have previously seen us as Minivid and/or Fuzzwich. Stream is a totally different approach to solving the same problem of making social advertising easier & more effective.

I'm interested in using Habitstream for Gridspy. It is quite a big price step between free, branded streams and unbranded commercial streams.

It is a cool idea, something that I'll have to come back an explore as we start to take off.

We're already using it at Wattvision (http://www.wattvision.com/info/about), and it's pretty cool. Feature suggestion: send me email reminders to approve new stream items. That would be a great feature. Like, "hey, you had 400 new mentions in the last week -- and here are some positive sounding ones. Click here to approve."

I gave this an honest try because the video looked awesome, but sadly it is not useful to me.

I basically just got a list of thousands of retweets for blog posts and a bunch of Disqus comments. Despite combing through many pages, I seriously could not find a single appropriate testimonial.

Maybe you could add Google Checkout support? For example: https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?... I have a really low volume of Google Checkout orders, but even that is a gold mine for testimonials.

Send me a message if you'd like some more info on my experience: jeff@wolfire.com

Hey Jeff, thanks for taking the time. Google Checkout reviews are a great idea... will definitely look into making that happen.

Don't know if it's useful for you, but in the meantime you can grab Amazon reviews by putting the whole Amazon URL of your product pages into a new search.

I'll send you an email w/ some extra questions - would love to hear more about your experience.

Thanks for the feedback. For many searches, there is a lot of noise and very little signal. This is a big usability problem. As we progress the product, we want to get really good at identifying the signal and filter out the thousands of duplicate and irrelevant comments (as you unfortunately stumbled upon).

The best searches for smaller companies right now will be those with unique names or those using a direct Amazon/YouTube/Rss URL, which is obviously not helpful for everybody.

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Google Checkout Reviews. I'll see if I can get that added by early next week and let you know.

Design nitpick:

Don't use fixed size containers and variable sized fonts:

http://skitch.com/scotchi/ns2be/habit-stream-curate-broadcas...

Thanks for the screenshot. We'll clean it up.

this is really really smart and a potentially big market. any smart site (ecommerce or whatever) has testimonials. the problem is, they're fairly static and people see them as possibly unsubstantiated. if i tweet "I <3 my iPhone" and its linked on your site, you cant ignore that. throw in the other sources too.

Hey Jason, thanks. Totally agree. I think there's also a certain value in the knowledge that the testimonials were unsolicited - just freely given to a friend in a normal conversation.

Cool, but I suspect we're not your audience.

It would be hard to imagine your API being simultaneously simple enough to be less work using Twitter's API manually, and customizable enough to dump out exactly what I want easier than massaging the data and presenting it myself.

But then if I was a guy in a band setting up our website, I could see this being really useful.

I think the real selling point for them is their moderation tool for sifting through all the twitter/blog comment noise.

I gave it a try and I liked it. I used it along with their API to make a "vanity quotes dashboard" for some open source projects I contribute to.

plug :) -> http://gwtquotes.appspot.com

To somebody just using Tweets (keep in mind that we currently also pull from Amazon, YouTube, Blogs, Blog comments and any RSS/Atom feed), we provide an extra safety net with our moderation. If you just incorporate the Twitter api directly on your site, you have to accept whatever users say showing up. With our moderation in between, you run no risk of the random or ugly comments showing up on your site.

Also, if you do to use more than just Tweets, our API returns normalized data so you have a consistent and reliable set of fields no matter the source.

You can see an example of results from our API here: http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d...

If you look closely at any of the Tweets in the set, all the data you can get from the Twitter api is still there.

I found it strange that you don't pull from blogs themselves. We have our own "what people are saying about our thing" page, and it's entirely populated with blog content.

If TechCrunch wrote up my app, it seems the only way I'd know about it from your service would be if somebody mentioned the app name in the comments.

What's the motivation there?

We search both blog content and blog comments, so if a TechCrunch article or TechCrunch comment mentions you, there is a good chance it will show up in the dashboard. Given the volume of tweets versus blog comments versus blog content, the blog content is usually more buried and has to be filtered out with the radio buttons provided when browsing a Stream.

Admittedly, we are not running our own crawlers right now, so it's hard for us to direct searching at older content or specific sites/blogs. We currently use Backtype (http://www.backtype.com) and ContextVoice (http://www.contextvoice.com) for finding blog comments and blog content respectively.

Our end goal is to find and rank social media content in real time. If somebody as prominent as TechCrunch mentions you, we would like you to know immediately and have that piece of content displayed, noticeable and ready for your approval in our dashboard within minutes.

We are not there yet and it sucks when we completely miss important mentions, but I promise we are working our damnedest to get better.

Hey that looks neat. How did you make that video?

Thanks! We actually made it ourselves, believe it or not. Some screen shots and drawings mixed with After Effects.

I want a product that lets me create videos like that on the web in 20 minutes.

Exactly my thought!

Found this today (off TC) http://www.xtranormal.com/

Kinda what I was thinking.

Wow that is brilliant. Well done!

It's weird to me that you aren't using your own product on your website. Or if you are, I looked around for it for a long time and didn't find it.

You don't think it would be a natural fit for your own start-up? ;-) You could display all the positive comments you are getting on your website, and updated in real time!

In short: Yes, it's weird, but there's a good reason! ;)

We're integrating realtime content pretty deeply into our site. It's a full redesign and we're still in the midst of the makeover. In the meantime, we wanted to start getting feedback from the community earlier rather than later.

(edited for clarity)

Rob is this your next startup? I ran into one of the fuzzwich guys last week at Startup Riot (forgot his name).

Hey Paul. Same company, same team (http://habitindustries.com/about), and still trying to make social advertising easier. It's been a winding (& interesting) journey of customer development from Fuzzwich to Habit Stream, which I'll probably post details of later this week.

Gotcha. I'm a big fan of the API examples in the meantime.

Widgets, ad units, and stream API: should be clickable links IMHO, they look like buttons, and are what i was interested in immediately

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