Ask HN: Took your advice, successfully! Let's try it again. | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Took your advice, successfully! Let's try it again.

5 pointspinksoda14 comments

My start-up is www.talkburst.com - review anyone by name and location. Categories such as "Professors & Teachers" and "Lawyers & Attorneys" allow easy reviewing of professionals - but reviewing your neighbor or co-worker is okay too!

In the last thread, the most valuable advice I was given was that you didn't want to sort through categories with hundreds of thousand reviews, sorted by last name.

I created a "custom feed" or "custom homepage" thing. Once you customize one, which consists of choosing the locations you care about and categories you care about, the homepage will display the latest reviews in your areas of interest.

What do you think of it?

Let's hear what you think it needs next.

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Have you checked out the draconian libel laws in the UK? They apply if the "libel" can be read from the UK.

How about the privacy laws in Italy - check what just happened to some Google Execs...

This could end up as a great "get rich quick" scheme for the lawyers.

Sorry to come on as a dampener but this is risky territory.

This is really something that will need to be adressed (fixed) in the near future before it gets out of hand and really impacts our industry in a negative manner.

Things like this seem to give a small minority of people anywhere on the globe the ability to basicaly terrorize and shake down companies and people in our industry.

I beleive that some kind of international free-harbor provision would be benificial to the internet and allow it to continue to grow freely.

Just don't let them terrorize you. Stand your ground, fight the fight.

I've had several very successful websites and I was always dealing with people and companies trying to "shake me down." I think it's just part of the game.

Was thinking about Italy too, if someone dared to launch something like this here he will receive a nice subpoena right after the site went public. Anonymous publicly visible opinions on someone else? Not here, way too risky.

Semi-public information, such as address or phone number, isn't allowed on the profiles, even though a simple whitepages.com search allows that.

The amount of information in the more than 1 million reviews that would be considered "private" is less than what you would already find through available avenues such as a Google search or even public records.

It doesn't seem risky in the US, I'm not aware of any similar laws here.

Fortunately, I don't live in the UK, so their laws don't apply to me, even if they say they do.

Ha, good one.

It's more generally called "forum shopping" but specfically it would be "libel tourism".

http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?stor... might open your eyes a little: >The most famous example is the case of Rachel Ehrenfeld, an American who wrote a book about the funding of Islamic terrorism. It sold a mere 23 copies in Britain, over the internet. But a Saudi businessman sued her in a London court and was awarded over £100,000 ($160,000).

That's pretty common. Take a look here:

>> Despite its track record of successfully defending cases brought in U.S. courts, in July 2003 a default judgment was entered against the site in the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court High Court of Justice for EC$27,100,932.00.[4] The award, made in Eastern Caribbean currency rather than U.S. dollars, has not been recognized or enforced by any U.S. Court.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ripoff_Report

Why do I have to create an acccount to see "more"?

I clicked on the "more" link for entrepreneurs, then, on the next page, had to choose the checkbox for entrepreneurs and click continue. You should automatically recognize which "more" link I clicked. Save the category checking for people who come to that page wanting to do a search or browse by category.

On the next page I had to put in two locations. I'd go with one and let the user add another one if they want.

Then I was asked to create an account. Why? I just want to browse your site. I stopped at this point, so it just became a waste of time.

It used to recognize which one you chose, then it showed you the first page of N amount of results, which for some categories is over 200,000 reviews, in alphabetical order. I got advice from HN'ers that it needed to be changed :)

The account simply narrows down the results for you based on your selections of categories and locations. You can enter just one location and it will still work, it just doesn't tell you that.

The account is barely an account, just pick a username and e-mail address, click, your password is in your inbox. Simply used to remember your preferences since it's pretty heavily customized (narrowed down) for you, to be relevant.

Now that I've explained it a bit more, do you have any suggestions?

I wouldn't require account creation until the user wants to post something. Store their temporary preferences in the session.

What if people do not want to be reviewed?

It works the same way as Citysearch or Yelp, in that aspect, anyone can review you. Members need to be aware of their local laws when writing potentially libelious or hateful statements - you open yourself up to lawsuits if you go on the site and start stirring up lies.

It's pretty easy to make your point, even a negative one, without being libelious/hateful/rude, which is the way it should be done.

Clickable link: http://www.talkburst.com

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