Kicking off a new website - appreciated feeback (good and bad)

1. Buttons which do nothing ("expand to show further panels...").

2. The question marks after "Change Location, etc" are really sized badly.

3. You are displaying escaped HTML in the right most scroll ('<b>Obama</b> says that...').

4. You inlined all the scripts AND stylings.

5. Design is very busy and doesn't look professional. In particular the 'WebLivz' box in the top left doesn't match theme and clips over existing text.

6. 'Please get involved' text isn't centered.

In summary, the site feels thrown together and adhoc. There are little problems, and bigger ones. I don't think this has enough polish or focus to be released for public consumption.

You need to a) simplify the design, and b) explain your added value to users, because it isn't clear how this is going to replace my RSS feeds.

Sorry to be critical of your work, but it really needs more polish before you start asking for public feedback.

Defaulting to politics is no fun. Here's an idea: Can you use the information which tells you where a user came from to customize the site for him? So say I came from HN, I would probably like to see stuff about technology, startups, ect. with the option of checking out other categories.

If the origin in unknown/unclear, then a default page similar to Google News would be nice, in that it shows all the major categories and top 3 from each.

Definitely work on cleaning up the interface so it's easily readable/scanable. Most users don't like to and/or don't know how to hunt for information if it's not amazingly simple to find.

Good luck!

All this talk of "we do this" and "we do that" actually makes me nervous to give you my data. It's just a wording/psychological thing.

That announcement thing gives me the irrits. You should show it over top of the content or otherwise you'll get a high bounce rate.

another site with square buttons? Isn't anyone getting sick of these yet?

Overall the experience was overwhelming. Where do I start? What do these things do? What should I click on next? Where is the value?

You talked about taking a river of RSS stuff - why not let me try it with my Google reader feed so I can see whether your intelligent stuff actually works?

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