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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

Don't know much much about tag clouds, so excuse my ignorance: But, has this basic idea been done before, except with things other than bands?

The reason I ask: My first impression was very strongly, "This is a neat tool, but why would they limit themselves to bands?". You could do this with ANYTHING...but with branding like "bandsintown" your potential market is 0.01 percent of what it could be. I strongly recommend getting a generic name (like myspace) and then:

1) Allow different product categories (Nearest coffeeshop, nearest book store that sells a certain book, nearest movie theatre playing a certain movie at certain hours, etc).

2) Allow different views of your model. Tag clouds strike me as a flash in the pan. Allow charts, bar graphs, pies, etc, etc.

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"You could do this with ANYTHING"

I think the answer to that lies in the idea of "focus". Trying to do too much leads either to not being very good at any of it, or worse, architecture astronaut trips into the stratosphere of making things ever more generic and able to handle all kinds of data and odd cases.

I guess my problem is that the name prevents any expansion later on, unlike the example myspace (which started out aimed at bands).

Yeah we do see the ability for expansion as well. Under another brand of course because you are right we do limit ourselves with our stratedgy.

The reason i do not use eventful and tools like that is because of the lack of focus. I know with bandsintown that I will be discovering new local shows and nothing else. This was our primary goal.

Okay, one last suggestion. The domain zintown.com is available. Thus:

band.zintown.com movie.zintown.com

(intown.com and other better variations were already taken.)

Thats awesome. Thanks, We own a few more ___intown domains as well, but i like this idea a lot.

I think he's totally wrong and what davidw said about focus is right on. It's easy to generalize any idea, but most of the time it just leads to mediocrity. Force the expansion out of your mind until you've completely dominated your current target. By then you'll probably see much better ways to expand than this obvious generalization.

Thank you for the input staunch. I def agree with everything you said. I also think its good to set goals for yourself and think well into the future, even though most of your original ideas and plans will end up far from where you had anticipated.

"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning."

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