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Comment by rinnku | Hacker News Reader

When Rinnku.com launched our intention was to bridge the gap between community news and social bookmarking (Digg + Delicious if you will).

In the six weeks since launch we’ve had some success. In particular over 18,000 links have been imported from Delicious.com by users who needed a more modern bookmarking experience.

However feedback from our users has shown we missed the mark. They don’t want or need another community news site.

So after crying in a corner for a while we went back to our users and asked - well what do you want? They told us they wanted a bookmarking service that’s effortless to use - "something that just works".

And that’s what we’re building. We’ve simplified the UI to make finding your links easier and quicker, enabled 1 click saving of links, added more help for new users and committed ourselves to creating the best bookmarking service in the universe.

I'd love to hear your comments.

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It looks like a nicely designed homepage that gets your point across well.

I clicked on the "Switch from Delicious?" button expecting to be able to authenticate with delicious and get going straight away. Instead I got a not terribly well presented list of reasons why I might choose to switch. At the very least there should be a clear call to action at the bottom of that list.

For sign-up is the CAPTCHA really necessary? If I understand your service correctly there is relatively little advantage to be gained by signing up multiple spam accounts and the presence of the CAPTCHA will reduce legitimate sign-ups.

Good points - thanks for the help.

I used the captcha to avoid having robots sign up but then maybe that is overkill?

It's likely premature optimisation. You may have a problem with bots signing up but I suspect at this stage it is not as large a problem as recruiting users.

You might also want to think about relying a little less on javascript. Try turning it off in your browser and see what you get. For me it was completely unusable and rather ugly.

Not a bad launch. I'm curious to hear about how you marketed and gained your initial users. Care to share a bit?

To start with I emailed TechCrunch. I was 99% sure they'd ignore me (bookmarking isnt sexy I guess) but I had to try right?

After 3 days with no reply I posted "review my site" posts HackerNews/Reddit and asked people at KillerStartUps, Lifehacker, feedmyapp, thenextweb, mashable as well as others to review my site.

I got most hits from thestartupfoundry.com (people linking to my site from my responses to other peoples posts), Reddit (launch post) and feedmyapp.com (site review)

I largely use Delicious as a way of posting a daily linkblog on Livejournal (see http://andrewducker.livejournal.com/tag/links )

If I'm switching to somewhere else it will need to have the facility to post daily updates to blogs/journals/etc.

Some comment(s):

- You want to have captcha for 2 successive failed login attempts.

The name is a little "racist."

Wow. I just realised. Nevertheless, I wouldn't term it racist.

I dont understand - why is it racist??

I took the phonetic version of the Japanese word for link (rinku) and added an extra n - http://translate.google.com/#auto|ja|link.

It's being perceived as sounding like the stereotype of how a Japanese person would say "Link You".

As someone living in a foreign country I have ocassionally dealt with racist behaviour so I'm aware of the pain it can cause.

I have to say that the thought of the name being racist never entered my head - I was just looking for a cool name and though rinnku looked good and would be easy to remember.

I apologize from the bottom of my heart for any pain I have caused.

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