Ask HN: Review my weekend project (Scribld.in) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my weekend project (Scribld.in)

5 pointsterryjsmith10 comments

URL: http://scribld.in/

First, thanks for taking the time to check it out.

I frequently find myself having ideas for projects, startups, etc. and find it difficult to keep them all organized. I wanted to build a site where I could keep all of those ideas together and bring people in for feedback as I needed; after two days and 30 hours of coding, this is the result.

If you have any questions, comments, feedback, etc. please feel free to ask them here or via e-mail (address in profile).

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I'm writing this as I go:

I hate having to log in to things to try them.

99% of the time I use a fake e-mail and junk password just to get past the barrier. If I like the service, then I rejoin with information I'm likely to remember.

Tried it with junk e-mail then realized you send an e-mail validation. Why? So annoying. Will attempt to re-register and use mailinator. Success, finally!

If I happened upon this site, I wouldn't be confident enough in what it does to ever create an account. Too much hassle to create an account for something that I have very little idea of what it does. It takes notes and lets me share them? I don't see the value.

Ok, I'm signed in... now I finally get to see wtf this thing does.

It's basically a way for me to create tiny discussions about stuff. Kind of neat... except for the fact that people are going to have to log in to comment and view any of my scribbles.

If you could make things more open by alleviating any need to log in, I might use it.

Yea, I get that and this was a call I had to make. The service allows you to uploads files, share links, etc. so I wanted to have some accountability for that. You can however check out the public scribbles in the Scribbles section at the top; maybe I should make that more clear? Maybe I should add a tour/features/walkthrough page to highlight what it does?

There are certain things I definitely want accountability for but I could add the ability to do some things anonymously (comment maybe?). I should mention that you can invite people to participate in your scribbles which will alleviate their need to validate the e-mail address since the invite has to go to a valid e-mail.

I like the simplification of "a way to create tiny discussions"; I may use that in the future if that's okay with you :)

"A way to create tiny discussions" was an idea I had for a start-up 3 years ago that I simply never got around to doing. I think there is a massive potential for such a thing, given that there currently isn't any easy way (that I know of) to create a tiny little forum somewhere quickly and easily. Right now, the closest thing is creating a post, or a note, or a group on Facebook and having really crappy discussions ensue. The Facebook discussion system is just awful, and it's a walled garden.

I think you should go with the "tiny discussions" idea, since I regrettably haven't.

There's no maybe about a tour/features/walkthrough... you need it. You need to adequately describe what your service does and why I should use it.

Like I said before, I've been thinking about the commenting space for about 3 years now. I've watched things like Disqus, Facebook Pages, and Ning pop up well beyond the time I had the idea of simplifying and unifying discussion. And, still, it seems nobody has managed to nail down the massive market of tiny forums.

To put this in perspective, google for virtually any type of forum. iPod forum. Nissan forum. Twilight Forum. Etc. The top results you'll get for each of this will be massively popular and lucrative message boards. Basically, they'll be a good domain name with PHPBB loaded up in them, and that's sufficient to get a critical mass of people using it. Now, think to yourself: in the next x years, what new products, movies, brands, etc will be created that will have potential for these similar types of lucrative forums? You can't know the answer. But as the future unfolds, the market will know. And if you could capture some of this market, you'd be in for a lot of traffic.

My conclusion is that the best way to go about this is to have users create the forums. I think there is a lot of money to be made in discussion forums, and user-generated forums is how you guarantee you are the first to capture the market's need for a particular forum. Think: A wikipedia of forums.

I realize this post might be pretty incoherent and barely related to your weekend project. Sorry, I haven't eaten breakfast yet.

Tried it with junk e-mail then realized you send an e-mail validation. Why? So annoying.

If a website asks for an email address and then doesn't validate it, people could be using anyone else's email address.

Nice utility. Few things that I think can improve user experience : 1. User gets no clue about what it is, what to do, how to do until and unless he creates an account. (there should be some kind of demo/trial stuff before logging in). 2. Even after logging in the documentation is very limited.

The thing is that User should know what to do. I understand it's a weekend project but i guess u can use HNers comments to improve it .

Absolutely, thanks for the feedback. Maybe this was a mistake on my part, but I wanted to use HN as a sounding board for improvements since it was built for me and it therefore obvious to me what it's job is. I figured it could be more useful, but needed some direction after living in my own little bubble this weekend.

Thanks again for the feedback! I'll put together a walkthrough and some help info and maybe some guiding information messages after you've signed up.

I was looking for something like this, but I would find it even more useful if it had like a mindmap feature. Not a classical mindmap, but more like "linking posts together" function. Because I like to review my thoughts as a whole, so a mindmap does a better job there. Nonetheless I do like the simplicity.

I like the idea of mapping posts to each other. Are you thinking of having a full "import" of one scribble to another or more of a related scribbles?

Thanks again!

It depends on the kind of idea I'm using it for! But I think linking in terms of import would be more useful.

Clickable: http://scribld.in/

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