Comment by bstpierre | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bstpierre | Hacker News Reader

I rarely use twitter; I've made concerted efforts but I mostly find the SNR is too high. I looked at your front page but didn't find it compelling.

1. I don't want to filter noise to folders, I want to skip it entirely. 2. I could care less about "losing" or missing a tweet. If there's something important, I'll get an email. If there's something truly compelling to read about, there will be multiple chances for me to see a relevant tweet. 3. A successful pitch to me would be something along the lines of removing the noise so that I'm getting almost pure signal. 4. What is it that I'm getting? Is it web-based, is it an app that runs on a smart phone (which I don't own), desktop (which platform?), something else? 5. Your blog entries go from 8 May to 13 Aug. Your twitter account has a lot of gaps too. I totally understand how hard it is to keep up with this stuff (I'm guilty of this too), but it makes me not want to invest too much time into something that you aren't necessarily fully invested in.

If we were to filter out any content, we would be breaking the agreement we made with Twitter when we started developing on top of their platform and they could revoke our access.

Thanks for the tip about pitching. The copy on the site needs work, so we'll be sure to make sure it explains exactly what Tweetdig is and what it does.

Our blog and twitter account is a bit neglected, but we feel that our time is better spent improving the product than writing blog posts. If anything, I'd say that shows that we're even more invested than if the blog + Twitter were very busy. If we were to spend more time on the social side of things, what would you like to see us do?

Re filtering: I guess from my perspective, all I'd really want is a binary filter with two "folders": worth-reading and crap. I'd never look at the crap folder, but you could still say you're presenting me all of the tweets.

Re social: Again, I fully understand where you're coming from. It's a hard thing to balance. Surely in the 3 months of no blog posts, though, there must have been something new you added that would have been worth blogging? It doesn't have to be earth-shattering news, maybe just show some signs of life. Maybe spend 20 minutes every Friday afternoon to mention what's new that week? Maybe tweet one or two things every morning about something semi-related to your service.

You're well within your rights to send tweets to a folder but never read them :)

Things do happen! Unfortunately most of what we do is technical, and our (perceived) target market doesn't really care about that side of things. I'm sure we can find one thing a week to say though.

Your link to TheNextWeb also makes me realized that you don't show pricing on your front page.

Also, realizing that I'd have to create rules for the filters is a downer. I was hoping for some kind of machine learning that does the opposite of spam filtering. (I guess that's what I really want -- a "ham" filter for twitter.)

Both of these points have been made elsewhere in the thread, so we should take a look at them. Unfortunately, machine learning isn't as good as users explicitly saying what they want to see (and not nearly as easy to implement either!)

As for pricing, our rationale is that a user shouldn't have to think about pricing unless they get to the stage that they need to pay, and are sufficiently invested in the product.

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