Rate my app: HootCourse | Hacker News Reader

Rate my app: HootCourse

hootcourse.com

29 pointsrriepe22 comments

Impressive web page and neat idea. Would be nice if you included a live demo of a course. It would give me an idea of what else you provide besides the "Hoot!" sidebar.

Good idea. I'll try to think of a way to integrate something like that.

Seconded. When I was reading the web site, the one thing I really wanted was to see what one of these courses looked like, so I could see at a glance if this really worked or if it was just good intentions and slick anti-aliased graphics.

There's definitely a lot of room for improving how education works, and I applaud the HootCourse guys for taking on something so worthwhile. Good luck.

The website is really impressive. But is HootSuite a problem for you guys, branding and trademark-wise?

Thanks.

As for HootSuite: not really. A couple of users have been confused so far, but that's it. We're using the owl because it's a bird (and we're using Twitter) and because of the associations with wisdom/learning.

You just described several conflicting areas and examples of user confusion. If you stick with this name, tread very carefully.

As far as we can tell, the only users who have been confused are ones who have followed HootSuite short URLs.

He's not pointing out something subjective; he's giving you a heads-up on what the lawyers are going to say to ensure that their case against you comes with a preliminary injunction.

Or you can make me an offer on classtalk.net ;)

If you do have trademark problems with HootSuite, you could also consider using an elephant with a couple small birds on it.

Elephants have a symbiotic relationship with a kind of bird that rides around on their backs and provides a valuable service (in this case, eating ticks--feel free to leave that part out!).

I think this would serve as a good metaphor for using tweets to facilitate the long-term retention of information.

and an elephant is old, wise and never forgets

Seems like a great idea... I really don't want to click the Fbook/Twitter buttons for fear that they'll publish something. A small disclaimer below that said something simple like "(Note: We won't spam your News Feed)" or something along those lines would be great :)

They won't. The app does work like a Twitter client when you're inside it though. Still some users missing that, so we're working on something to communicate the process better.

It's actually been interesting to see how hard the new wave of privacy concerns are hitting the apps. We didn't think we would need a privacy policy for a while; but our /privacy got 18 hits without anything existing there, and without it being linked to.

The instructors using our tool have been very vocal, and we're absolutely thrilled about that. However, we haven't heard too much from our fellow hackers or our instructor's students. If you've got a minute or two to spare, please let us know what you think.

This looks interesting, but I'm thrilled to hear that you are actually talking to customers first. Listen to them.

Nits: 1) I don't like that the 3 sellings points on the splash screen are aligned with 3 unrelated feature images. I was expecting each image to reflect each selling point and got a little confused.

2) The green hills footer bugs the crap out of me on the inner screens. Seeing text peak around a curved footer when I'm scrolling just doesn't look right.

Just out of curiosity, what resolution are you using? I just happen to be using my old laptop today and I could see how the hills could be more distracting than we had anticipated.

I find them annoying as well. 1600x1200.

I didn't realize that I could scroll through the hills (using a macbook pro at 1440x900) and accidentally hit my scroll wheel.

The clouds at the top are annoying as well, but significantly less so than the hills.

Also a quick point on #1 - the images caught my eye more than the text and the images/text seem to link to different places.

If you want to get all 6 of these points across, I'd suggest letting the text live alone where it is then placing the images in a 3 column layout down below and enlarging them.

Great site! I share some of the sentiments here about the hills being a distraction and also would like to see some sort of demo that shows a typical session. I'd also like to see your "About" page more prominently displayed, instead of being embedded in a text link that I had to find like an easter egg lol.

My question is this (and I'm not so sure if this is proper to ask), but is there a pricing structure? What might your revenue model for this be like?

Excellent design/graphics.

I would suggest making the description of what the site does a little longer (not too long though). Example:

"Supplement face-to-face classes with a HootCourse and get to know each other faster." ... add another sentence or two here so I don't have to click around too much to get a little more info on this sentence.

That was my first impression at least.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com