Ask HN: Rate my startup: Utopic, a site showing what your friends like | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rate my startup: Utopic, a site showing what your friends like

8 pointsjkaljundi8 comments

http://utopic.me/ Utopic shows the hottest daily topics and content among your friends and people you follow on Twitter and Facebook (more sites to be added soon). Utopic is the fastest way to see what’s popular right now, breaking it up by categories like videos, music, links, events, photos etc. Utopic gives a personalized real-time view of what’s trending today among people who matter to you the most. Instead of going through long linear feeds and tens of external websites, see hot content from friends all immediately in one place, in a prioritized order. Other data sources like Google Reader, music services and others will be added shortly.

Utopic solves the problems of: - Curiosity: everyone wants to know what's trending or hot among their friends. - Information overload: there’s too much content on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc, even among people you’re following. Utopic brings out just the important stuff. - Too many sites to go through: Utopic aggregates everything popular into one site.

Technically what we do is a pretty complex issue. Even for a few hundred users, we have indexed a few million links and hundreds of thousands of people sharing/liking/retweeting stuff in our databases. Adds up to gigabytes of data already early on. Big data & processing it rocks - something our team loves :) A bad side to it is that importing Facebook & Twitter data for a new user can take hours (yeah, their API's are slow, especially FB) so you see full advantage of the service may be only on your second login.

Any suggestions on how to improve the service? Anything you like or dont like? How to make it more social & viral, for it not to be a single-user tool?

You can also e-mail me at jk@utopic.me. Thanks in advance!

It's an attractive way of laying images and vidoes out you've got there - much prettier than vanilla Facebook. My gut feeling is you need more flexibility over the way you can sort them (by number of likes, particular groups of friends etc.) to be truly useful.

Side note: I don't like apps requesting permission to post on my wall unless they have a very clear reason for doing so, and I suspect I'm not the only person here that thinks like that.

Thanks for the feedback! We're thinking hard about sorting, filtering, personalization etc. From one side some people require that, at the same time it adds to the clutter on the page. We don't want to add features that only small % of users would use.

Regarding FB permissions, you are absolutely correct. In our case, we need the FB wall posting right only if a user wants to like/share via an API from Utopic to FB. Will think if it would be a good idea to move asking for that permission to the point when a user wants to share something on their wall the first time. We ourselves never initiate any wall postings.

Actually I would need exact the opposite - a tool that would get rid of all "hot and trendy", simply because I have no problem whatsoever of finding them. For example right now I would really appreciate if I somehow could clean my twitter feed enirely of Japan news. I'm not at all interested what happens there, and if I am, then it is not difficult at all to find relevant news. As you said - Information overload: there’s too much content on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube etc, even among people you’re following - get rid of the "trends" and I'll start using utopic.

True, different target groups want different services. Some want more automated approach, some more manual personalization. Some need to know top news and see top videos, others want very specific niche stuff. There are markets for both, we believe.

But you already have that what I want. You collect everything (?) and then filter out the trendy ones. Now do the opposite - show me everything minus trendy.

I'm seeing a lot of sites now with a landing page that requires immediate registration or facebook connection to do anything. Are people seeing this as a successful way to get people registered, is it because there's not much to see other wise so they want you to register first?

Just seems like a terrible way to encourage registration, by making you "pay" in the form of a registration before really hooking you in.

I could be wrong, though. Would love to hear if other people have good or bad experiences with this type of flow.

You should approach this on a case to case basis, depending what your site does and what is actually needed. Having built many services before, I've always chosen what is right in that case. If there is data & content to show before registration, go for it. A public photo/video site like Youtube would be very different from a hosted e-mail provider like Gmail.

In Utopic case, there is very little to show the user otherwise, as a lot of what we have built is based on Facebook API data. We could have longer about pages, screenshots etc, but that would be it.

Many have asked us for other registration/login methods (e-mail registration, Twitter etc) but for us what you would end up with would be an empty site, resulting in disappointment.

Clickable link: http://utopic.me/

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