Ok HN, 5 weeks in, here's where our startup is at...
So here's an update with our startup, http://www.howl.com. We need your thoughts and suggestions and criticisms. Our initial post was less clear as to what we did. It should be clearer now, so here's what we've got.
Howl.com is a link blogging platform, a place to share and discover links. To post a link, you simply paste the URL. We'll grab the titles, description, thumbnails, and embed images or videos.
In the past couple weeks, we've added some features we think can give a bit more value to our users. They include:
- Ability to automatically post to Facebook and Twitter accounts whenever you post on Howl. - Reblogging: 1 click to repost content directly to your link blog
- Thumbnail selector on the edit page, which scans the URL for images and lets you choose one as your post thumbnail. (we may include this directly in the posting process)
- Users subscriptions which will show posts in a a basic feed, and an explore page so people can see whats being posted and what the site is about
- A few little things like avatars, location/about fields, and giving your blog a custom title
Some things we haven't added yet that we want to do:
- Globalized comment pages, so that anyone who shares the same links can get to a centralized discussion page, where they can also see other people who posted the same link and other networking data.
- Add a "Preview" button that lets people see and edit their post before they publish it.
- Faster spider and posting process.
Please give it a try, you can use our demo account (demo // asdfasdf) or register your own. We'd love your feedback and can handle the tough stuff. Thank you very much!