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Show HN: My minimum viable side project

babynamegraphs.com

46 pointsphuff38 comments

What exactly does "viable" mean in this context? Because the husband and wife team behind NameVoyager have had the baby name trend visualization market cornered for years now.

http://www.babynamewizard.com/voyager#

They aren't just using it to drive ad traffic and promote the book, but are now (since I last looked) actually charging for the visualizations themselves. And presumably people are paying, but who knows...

On the plus side, this means there's a market, but you've got a long way to go to catch them, both in regards to the visualizations and the breadth of the name database. It's a good start, though.

Yeah, viable in this context means that you can graph names and there are ads on the page. All the times we've tried to look at names for popularity when naming our kids we haven't had just simple visualization tools like this, so I thought I'd build one.

Then after I started I saw those guys but saw that you have to pay to visualize it, so I thought "hey, I'll disrupt them " :)

Of course there's always Wolfram|Alpha.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=David%2C+John

you keep using "disrupt"; I do not think it means what you think it means

Not to be too harsh, but I agree, this is hardly a "viable" product. It pretty much is a college-level assignment where you just graph data in a database. It's needs a lot more work before it becomes minimally "viable".

Why make people guess the names? Every name I picked seems to drop down dramatically, but if I want to find the most popular names, I have to guess it? Why not show the top 10 most popular names?

What about a logarithmic graph? If you graph "Isabella" or "David" next to any name, it renders the graph useless.

Sorry to be a downer, but Wolfram Alpha has beaten you to the punch:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Andrew

Grr, WolframAlpha also fails to acknowledge my name. What a difficult life I lead...

@phuff this is cool because it has a specific purpose and it's simple. Frankly, if you let the fact that something already exists on the Internet stop you from starting a projet, you'd never start anything.

There will always be room to iterate on good ideas. There were MP3 players on the market before the iPod, right? And focusing on design or simplicity, or both, can play into what your MVP is. Minimum viable is relative to your product principles.

The one thing i would suggest is that ads are not minimally viable for your users. It may be necessary for you to keep your project up and running, but not MVP unless they provide some benefit to your users in line with your product principles.

Nice work!

I can't remember the name of the book, but I remember reading that people name babies both after celebrities and after names of the higher class people around them (with the goal of their children appearing higher class than they actually are). The latter case is interesting, because it goes in a cycle - the higher class folks pick unique names for their children, the lower class folks copy them in the next generation so those names become common, and the higher class folks pick new names in the next cycle.

So if the data was there, it'd be interesting to show these graphs both alongside celebrity popularity over time and also to divide the graphs based on socio-economic lines, to see if that is still happening.

I think the book is Freakonomics (don't have it here to check).

Pretty sure that's it. The first one.

I agree with lemma, I think it's Freakonomics. I have some basic stats/other demo graphs that I think might be interesting. This kind of Celebrity type graphing would be fun, too. Thanks for the idea!

I'm a US expat in Brazil and here people from the shanty towns name their kids Michael Jackson, George Washington, etc...except they're spelled and pronounced according to Brazilian Portuguese rules. Ex, "MJ" is pronounced something like "Mikeuw Jeksó". Another is Wallace which becomes "Uallacy" when pronounced.

There's a Peruvian film called Madeinusa (Mad-in-ewsa) about a girl of the same name, all because her mother found it on the back of a t-shirt and thought it was a good "American" name.

Fix the XSS: http://babynamegraphs.com/male/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5...

Thanks

Try this:

http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B...

and double click to show the "all time" graph.

Note this shows _females_.

And, of course, you have to see what this returns:

http://babynamegraphs.com/male/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B%5...

Yeah, I actually have them separated this way because I couldn't think of a great way to label/display male + female names for the same graph at the same time. I've thought of only showing the predominant gender for each name, but then doozies like the female John http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names[]=... would be unavailable :)

My name (Tikhon) didn't even get a graph :( Probably because it's an exceptionally uncommon name (but not uncommon enough for me to get it as a username).

In the list of names on the graph, could you make the "X" look a little bit more like a UI element? The first time I saw it, I thought it was just a letter. I think even just aligning the X's along the right side of the rectangles would help.

That's a good idea. Thanks! Also, I have only crawled the SSA site for the names, so if it's not in the top 1000 for some year in the USA since 1880 it won't be in there.

Small hack: Instead of using "X" for the delete icon, use "×". It looks more like a delete/close button and still avoid the trouble to create an image.

Hey, thanks for the tip! I'll check it out.

Out of interest, what's the data source? US only?

Yeah, I scraped it from the social security website, so US only for right now.

Would be good to have that clear on the website, that was my first Q. Cos I suspect from knowledge of my name and the lookup I just did on your site, the UK data looks very different :-) If you could compare countries that would be cool.

A lot of interesting data. Apparently the name Hillary massively plummeted in popularity during the Clinton administration, but then spiked during the 2008 elections!

There was also a brief Geraldine fad in 1988, coinciding with Geraldine Ferraro's candidacy for Vice President.

It reminded me of the assignment from Google's Python Class http://code.google.com/edu/languages/google-python-class/exe... :)

Exactly why I looked this name up http://babynamegraphs.com/female/multipleNamesGraph?names%5B...

I'd suggest putting focus in the 'Add another name' text box after every reload. If I want to add multiple names, it's irritating to have to reach for the mouse to put the focus back in the textbox for each one.

Good call, I'll add that in. Thanks.

You could mash this with a name visualization hack I did in the spring: http://namestofaces.com/

Styling is messed up on an iPad

Styling ok for me but the drag and double click actions dont work...

Well the design is good, simple to use, and most important: effective. Unfortunately, unless you and I have a different definition of viable, this idea isn't very lucrative. I've seen a lot of different websites with this same idea, how is yours different?

It's a good question. Right now I'm not sure. I hadn't seen the babynameclusters guy down below :)

this is dope, nice work :)

Neat. My name (Tristan) went from #451 in 1994 to #121 in 1995. Maybe because Brad Pitt played a character named Tristan in Legends of the Fall in 1994?

Here's a website I made a few years ago: http://www.babynameclusters.com/name/Tristan/Male

That's a good guess regarding the Brad Pitt character. I should add movie character names - those might be more influential than famous people in wikipedia.

What's the data source on that one? Is it a wiki scrape?

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