Review my startup - Airfeed | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup - Airfeed

airfeed.me

20 pointsanteksiler26 comments

It's cool, I just don't think my Facebook friends have very good taste.

"We don’t know what you like, but your friends do" isn't really true for me. I don't friend people on Facebook because of their great taste in youtube clips, I friend them because I know them in the real world where stuff like that doesn't really matter. Maybe you could add some other avenues of relevance, like connecting you to other Airfeed users' feeds directly based on similarity of videos you've posted to your own feed.

I like that you pull in videos from pages I've liked, that adds a lot of relevance, nice.

It's a bit slow obviously but I'll give you a pass on that. On a related note, I do have to mention that the "your videos are being fetched, please come back in a few minutes" is a bit of a showstopper. At that point I'm liable to say "screw this" and close the tab and never return. It should 1) auto-refresh when ready, and 2) give them a reason to stay, either a fun animation or a small random video from their feed they can "play now" or some instant gratification. I'm sure you know this already, in which case, good job, keep on developing.

Also I agree with another commenter—no need to call everything a "startup" just because it's the hot word around here. It's a web app. Great start.

> "We don’t know what you like, but your friends do" isn't really true for me.

A lot of things are behaving like this for me. When Netflix was first released here only myself and a few close friends had it, and we all have similar tastes. Now everybody seems to (go Netflix!), and so my recommendations really aren't relavent to me at all... It also didn't help that I set it up on the PS3 and my housemates watch nothing but Top Gear on it.

I wasn't aware that Netflix used social data to influence your recommendations; I was under the impression that they were based only on your own use and ratings.

Thanks to both of the top commenters. Like I said, this is alpha version, so take it easy on me :)

Thanks for the feedback, and this is really helping me, great feedback, thanks! :)

I agree. Sometimes I see some funny videos. At best it is random, unless they forward a video directly to me.

Ant, congrats on the project. I believe it is a great tool at this moment it is very far from being a startup or business. We, Turkish developers, are good at developing such tools but converting them to profitable products. Don't do any categorization/tagging feature. It won't get you 20x users. It won't make you win an award from ACM or so. Focus on the idea/problem and make really sure that you are solving an actual problem. In this case, is losing Facebook videos I watched really a problem that bugs many people? How frequently does that happen? Your product should fit to the market very well. Otherwise, it is an hobby project (which I used to have so many of them).

Thank alp,

We would like to transform into a video collection site. So the next update will include the ability to add videos to your collection by pasting their youtube/vimeo/dailymotion link.

Like I said, profitability is a not as-important at the moment before we create something that is actually being used by many people.

Sure, try to find a real use and at the time you prototyped that feature, send the link to 10 of your friends. If 3 of them return back tomorrow and after a week if 1 of them still uses it actively, then you are almost good to go.

It's a cool project, but I wouldn't necessarily call it a start-up. How will you monetize while depending on FB? Is this currently a pain-point for people, to the point that they would pay money for it?

I guess you are right, we are not planning on profiting from this at first.

Its a pain point for some, since I see lots of people scrolling through their news feed to find a video they watched before or just to kill time.

> I guess you are right, we are not planning on profiting from this at first.

When are you planning to have a business model then? It appears the users are* the product again, as usual.

It looks nice though.

*) or will be.

Two issues:

1) Upon login, my facebook username (which has a '.' in it) was 'invalid'. Just strip out any bad characters and use that for the login. Even better -- why do you need a username when you're logging in with facebook??

2) "Your videos are being fetched. Please check back in a couple minutes". You have to have this display a 'loading' animation and go fetch the videos with AJAX. You'll lose TONS of people with this.

Hi there,

1) Your username is needed to create your channel, airfeed.me/username

2) Yes, this was mentioned on couple of comments. We will be fixing this on the next update.

Neat. I have a more or less similar idea, in that I want to stuff with people's feed. I am currently looking at implementation options. Can you guys share with us what you did to build this and the types of issues you faced? A post-lunch follow up post will be very nice.

It looks really good (good site design), and it seems like it would work pretty good. It just seems like the type of business that's one Youtube or Facebook update away from oblivion.

Let me explain it this way.

"TV experience for your Facebook videos"

Your news feed videos are automatically fetched and organized. You just need to turn on "auto play" and turn into fullscreen mode :)

Depending upon mood if you are just into watching videos then this may work very well. Personally I like to see everything in my news feed.

Clean design, simple. Like it! and as some have said some kind of tagging and filtering would be nice... not all my friends have good taste

Thanks dlopez,

We are thinking of adding search, tagging, and "add to my channel" features before we go live.

Nice idea. I would pay a reasonable fee for something like this, given a few changes:

- Having it based on YouTube / Vimeo, not FB

- I wouldn't care about my friend's feeds to be honest, but I would love to be able to watch channels created by people with similar interests, on a specific topic and so on...

Thanks for the replies.

We are actually working on a categorization/tagging feature.

Didn't you just describe the Youtube homepage when you are logged in?

Nice, clean design.

Thanks appreciated.

requires my email address - sorry nope.

Jebus. You must be really limited to what services you can use if you're not willing to sign up with an email address.

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