Ask HN: Please give us feedback on our (anti-social) tool thinkery.me

One of the examples of what to enter into thinkery, "Who the fuck is JSON? #thought", is in poor taste and I'd recommend changing it to something else. Not that I personally find the word "fuck" offending, but it does feel unnecessary and out of place.

I thought that would be funny but it seems I'm the only one, so gonna change that into something more meaningful. Sorry if you were offended by it :/

Oh, not at all! I get the idea, but the word just really stood out to me, and not in a good way. So I thought I'd mention it :)

It's supposed to be an example of what you would put in your private thinkery, I think it's fine. I have a bunch of "wtf is X?" thoughts every now and then, where X is something I heard about recently.

All in all, I like it. It's simple, useful, and the app gets out of the way to let me do what I want.

Some points of feedback:

- The tagging functionality is kind of buried and isn't labeled at all. I'm not sure how prominent you want to make it, but here are two thoughts: you could allow for dragging of an entry to a tag on the left (this would be even more useful if there was a way to add a new tag on the left) or you could add tagging functionality before the edit page (like above or below the preview panel on the right)

- I put in the wrong pw on the delicious importer but didn't see any error message.

- Again, I'm not sure if this is a direction you want to go, but it seems like there might be some interesting collaborative elements you could incorporate; like logged-in users being able to leave notes on public items

- Mobile would be nice, as would a browser plugin or desktop app that allows me to dump in content easily.

Most of my feedback would put you on a path to be more of a bookmarking service and maybe you want to leave things more open than that. Either way, congrats for making a great app and good luck going forward!

As I'm a big fan of storing things in clumsy, inefficient ways just to get them down (drafts in gmail is my thinkery...) I can definitely see the appeal of something that just lets you type away with minimal structure.

The hashtagging of absolutely everything works really well #like

I like the idea of being invited to "Login to your brain" ;-) #interface

The facility to copy/paste in non-media files as well as text would be nice... obviously this takes up more bandwidth but that's something you can easily charge for. #suggestion

Whilst I very rarely use them, I think a screencast demoing the sites functions would be a good idea #suggestion

More social probably helps you promote the app, but your suggested feature list sounds a lot more useful

Also, like a number of people I seem to have had small problems with register/login (specifically the validations advise email addresses are incorrect if you paste/autocomplete them into place). #bug

Delicious importer doesn't seem to work with Yahoo IDs. Not sure if there's a way around that #bug

Firstly, I love the easy use of adding and searching items.

Recommendations:

* Use more width for your design. It does have too much white space on the right side and therefore too few space for your content (Firefox 3.6.13 on Mac)

* There is text beneath your footer

* your logo on /titncs is blurry

* Maybe you could add an "processing" message, especially for amazon links

Mobile apps would definitely be a priority for me, with an emphasis on fastest speed for adding things (should work well with the tags). Also, the paranoid me can't find an explicit privacy policy. Are private notes encrypted?

In addition to the Ubuntu issue already pointed out, the copyright overlay is blocking the bottom of your pages on various browsers, specifically "Get your own thinkery now >>" on the main page and "embed.ly" on the About page.

Tagging and display looks very useful. Overall I like it, and I'll be watching in the future for the mobile apps.

I registered but was unable to actually try the service due to some error - "We couldn't interconnect the neurons.Please excuse and try again". Anyway, I saw the urls provided by you and here are some suggestions -

1. If appropriate, deep integration with facebook, twitter, linkedin etc, not only to ease registration process but also for sharing content(in both directions)and other social features.

2. Utilize FB API to provide a social network around your service and let users share/comment/discuss/rate/etc. about your public things.Provide top rated/discussed thinkeries somewhere on your home page.

3. Instead of making it just public and private, provide access levels - public, friends, private, customized, etc.

4. Mobile application for quick/anytime/anywhere thinkering.

5. A search interface for searching public thinkeries and adding them to your own collection.

6. Facility to add thinkeries through SMS, email, chat etc. example - SMS your new design/startup idea to your thinkery using short code or forward an intersting e-mail to your thinkery. That leads to another idea that e-mail and chats can also be a kind of thinkery items.

Thanks for your feedback, lots of what you've written sounds very good. We'll put it on our list.

First we need to fix some bugs though. Did you get the error when you hit register or at another point?

I got the error after logging in @ my home page

Give me options to share my thinkeries on my FaceBook wall and Tumblr and I would definitely use it. I might just start using it anyway.

At the moment you need to set a thing "public" then copy&paste the link into Facebook. We're gonna introduce FB-Share/Like and Tweethis-Button soon. Is that what you meant/wanted?

I think I've found something I didn't know I was looking for.

Also...when I start to add a bookmarklet and click "cancel", it takes me to an error page.

I think I'd rather not lose the page I'm on when I bookmartlet it, but I haven't used it enough to decide. If I click cancel I definitely don't want to. Maybe a new tab?

clickable: http://thinkery.me

I'm using Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu, and the 'Try it Out' and 'Register' buttons are overlapped and the whole page is awkwardly clustered into the left half of my screen. Sorry to start you off with a bug report, your product solves a very real problem.

No need to say sorry, thanks a lot for the feedback! We haved tested the site on Firefox 3.6 for Mac, Chrome and Safari. Unfortunately there goes the cross-browser-madness again because it's different on all systems.

You can try it out without registering if the main input field works, it's got lazy registration :)

If you paste something in the text box, the gray/hint text doesn't disappear.

When I tried to register, I get an error upon entering my email address - "invalid email address" - I tried closing and reopening the register window. (I'm trying on Chrome 9/Win)

Otherwise, just looking through it - like the layout and the general concept is intriguing. To answer your question of focus, I like the idea of filters or aggregating additional content. (But please let me choose whether or not to accept those new content streams.)

EDIT: When I register from the homepage, the form works. Previously I tried to click register while viewing your sample Nader page.

Try it out/Login buttons seem broken to me.

http://imgur.com/aKDjW

Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu screen resolution 1280x768

The concept is great. Love the low friction of the free form input as well as the public/private dichotomy.

One minor bug I encountered: If I enter "I like #foo" and save it, it is filed under the tag #foo. If I then edit that item to be "I like #food" it stays filed under it's original tag, #foo, rather than being moved to #food.

Edit: edited to clarify bug description.

I can't register because my email address is too long 30 chars, it says "please fill out all fields appropriately" I'm running Chrome

Wow, long e-mail address :) Gonna fix that, btw you can check thinkery without registering by simply typing something into the input field.

Make it 320 characters long. You never know how long e-mail address people can make.

actually there was no restriction on the length of the e-mail address but rather a problem with Chrome's autofill.

I like it.

I've been using a combination of tumblr/facebook-status-line to do these kind of things.

This is much much better.

Hey you have something really attractive here, after lunch im gonna try it, and if it convinces me, i'd be very sorry for workflowy but i'd leave them.

More comments later :)

I like it - make the private lock clickable though - the other icons do what's expected, but the lock icon does nothing

Definitely need a mobile version. I write most notes on the go, and I'm sure that's true for a lot of people.

yeah, love it, but won't use it without a mobile version :(

Thanks HN community. Your feedback was very valuable to us and awesome!

Licorize does something similar.

I don't see anything new.

PS: I'm bitten by the type of services you note above, my "brain" is stored locally on my browser backed up by myself, I'm fine with what I have..

Didn't check out Licorize yet but from a first impression this looks a bit different with the "projects" and "todos" ... or maybe i don't understand it fully.

Did you check out the content extraction, instant-search or posting a youtube url for example?

Thanks for the feedback.

One more thing: I'm also using it for things like a shopping list where you can add a sentence with hashtag (like on twitter) and it automatically generates a tag out of it for you to filter.

http://thinkery.me/nader/4d2b4a6e747759286c000000

or something like an amazon product: http://thinkery.me/nader/4d1d0ec2747759af42000000