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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

Thingist (http://thingist.com), which is one of my side projects.

/Warning: Rant/

Status updates as they exist right now freaking suck. There's not any context, no way to organize them. They're disorganized. I used to always post songs that I liked to my facebook or twitter feed so that I could share them with my friends (as well as find them later). A problem was that I had to search through 5 years worth of statuses to find the songs.

On thingist, it's just a list: http://thingist.com/t/list/38/

I used to do the same thing with quotes. If I found a quote I liked, I would usually share it on facebook or twitter. Same problem as with the songs...and now I have a list for it: http://thingist.com/t/list/51/

Or bars I like: http://thingist.com/t/list/65/

Or things that blow my mind: http://thingist.com/t/list/134/

etc. etc.

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Most users don't want to add context or have to organise stuff. I signed up for your service, added something I like, but having to fill out a form after? Ugh, I am lazy.

The reason why Twitter is successful is that its so simple, there are millions of use cases.

I agree with you on the form thing, which is something that I'm adding within the next week (the ability to add something to a list without having to fill out the second form [this was something that the users asked for]).

That said, people are willing to fill out extra information about (look at digg, reddit, youtube, fark, etc. etc.)...maybe not for status updates, but thingist isn't about status updates.

Use cases for twitter? I get hashtagging events (I saw this first hand at the intel appup conference last week), but what else beyond that?

I definitely do the "want to share but also 'bookmark'" thing with my Twitter updates. And, yes, hashtags somewhat solve this, but not really - at least not for me. I like the idea of lists on Thingist, but I don't want to have to categorize all my tweets.

If Thingist could automatically categorize my updates, but have a way for me to re-organize them, that'd be ideal. Seems like a decent amount of people fall into your same use case, where they tweet quotes, songs, videos, etc. Some of these would be easier to detect than others, but it's somewhat doable.

This seems some like weird cross section between Twitter, Tumblr, and delicious to me.

There are services that add links you tweet to delicious

This is something that I've been trying to figure out for a while now...

Categorizing them is really, really hard to do. Look at the ways that this user uses the site: http://thingist.com/t/item/3051/

"Things that make me feel better when I'm sad" would be impossible to detect programatically.

"Show me all of the links to youtube or soundcloud I have posted" is totally doable, and is something that will probably happen within the next couple of days.

Touche. I'm thinking way too much like a programmer. Thanks for posting that link, it's a good reminder of how different people are.

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