Show HN: Forkbin lets you fork public lists | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Forkbin lets you fork public lists

forkbin.com

34 pointsjmtame14 comments

Very nice! I've been toying with a similar idea for a while too, here's some feedback and ideas from my own project:

- Bug: Don't let me create empty list items.

- Definitely let people make private link-only anonymous lists without being logged in, then let them claim (ie. fork into an account) when they make an account.

- Have an embed code, so that you can make a list and embed it in a blog post or whatnot. Then you can maintain the list on forkbin without worrying about updating your blog post every time something changes.

- If you let people include media in the content (top music videos? best photos of X? etc), then they can use it for much more than you originally planned.

Also, think about what kinds of lists you want to optimize for. I've been trying to break down all types of lists into a small set of orthogonal categories, this is what I've come up with: https://gist.github.com/2467329 (feedback welcome--note that maintaining this list and accepting feedback is a pain itself).

Best of luck!

Quite a cool idea, nice! :)

Suggestion, might be friendlier to let us play with the app first, before requiring an upfront commitment to register.

After clicking the "Fork" button, and then seeing that form... CMD-W and onto the other 20 open tabs :p

Thanks! Yeah, I think you're right--registration shouldn't be required to create or fork a list, especially for newer users who are curious to try it out for the first time.

Seconded. Having a demo that you can immediately start playing with is absolutely vital for gaining traction with a novel app.

This is cool, but I'd like to be able to fork one of my own lists. Consider this use case:

I'm a freelance web developer, for example, and there are twenty things I need to do on every project. I could create a master list of things that need to get done, then simply fork that list every time I start a new project, which will inevitably have a unique set of other items to be completed.

I assumed that's what this was: git-like management of lists. As soon as I found out the social aspect was mandatory, I tried to figure out how to close my account and failed.

Please, people: If you don't have a way to delete accounts on your app, it's not ready to go live.

You can make your list private. So, it isn't pure social as you mentioned. Email me at siong1987@gmail.com. I will delete the account for you. :)

The social aspect isn't mandatory, and your list is private by default. You have to opt-in to make it public. Sorry for any confusion!

I actually think about that before. But, decided not to let people to create multiple forks of the same list. Now, after looking at your use case, it seems to make sense to allow multiple forks for the same list from the same user.

Try out workflowy. Its a YC backed todo list app. It has an explicit option of duplicating a particular list, which should easily cover your use case.

Looks interesting. But perhaps give a use case so that we can see where it will be useful (in particular the forking action)?

Thanks! The idea was started out of the desire to make travel itineraries easy. For example, my girlfriend and I made a list of things we wanted to do when we went to London. It was a lot of work to comb through all the various travel sites, but we still built an itinerary together.

I think most people will share the same basic group of tourist locations (eg the food markets, major art galleries, etc) but they'll want to do other things uniquely interesting to them. So it'd be easy to fork a basic "London tour guide" list and then add your own couple of items there. I think it'd be more interesting to look over other people's lists rather than search through a bunch of web sites with ads.

Another idea I've had is that I go shopping through the produce section of Safeway all the time (I live in Sunnyvale, and that move-in list on the home page is real). I have no idea what I'm doing, but I have friends who buy the healthy stuff. I would like to see what their shopping lists look like.

I love the simplicity.

We started with a very similar premise around collaborative list-building for travel when we created http://www.planapple.com. (We're a couple years of features and iterations into it now, so it's grown beyond simple lists in both functionality and UI complexity.)

FWIW, we've had trouble getting any traction on public list sharing, and we've tried a handful of different approaches. Our users are very happy to collaborate in small groups, but that's where it ends.

Some stumbling blocks:

1. You'll need a critical mass of really good, yet somewhat mainstream, lists to attract people who will fork an existing list.

2. Until you have that, you'll attract mainly people who want to build their own lists from scratch and enjoy/are willing to put "a lot of work" into their planning. And that's fine (it's who we're getting now) -- but that kind of people tend to build highly-customized lists that aren't likely to appeal to most other users.

3. Mainstream users aren't that willing to spend effort searching through a bunch of different lists to find one that matches their interests. (Though if you have ideas for an algorithm that can figure out my list for London on a backpacker's budget won't appeal to your interest in a luxury London holiday, let me know!)

4. In practice (for travel planning, at least), the lists tend to contain a mixture of general-interest info plus specific details (like my hotel confirmation number) -- which means they need filtering before they could be made public (and people don't want to spend time on filtering).

But I definitely don't mean to discourage you -- just wanted to pass along some of what we've learned.

Thanks for sharing.

Is an open version of google schemer ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com