Show HN: Storylane - People sharing things that matter | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Storylane - People sharing things that matter

storylane.com

33 pointsjongs42 comments

Fantastic!

What the hell does it do? I'm not signing up without knowing a single thing about this service.

From the welcome email...

Hi Ian, Welcome to Storylane, a place for great inspirational life stories. So that we can help you get started, here are some of things you can do on Storylane:

Share stories Everyone has amazing life stories to tell, and so do you! Sometimes the only thing you need to get started is a good suggestion for some inspiration. Start sharing stories »

Ask anyone to tell a great story Whether it's your friend or someone you look up to, everyone has amazing life stories. Storylane makes it easy for you to ask people to tell their stories. Find people and ask them for stories!

Save the ones you love Storylane is full of great stories, and it's easy to discover those close to your heart. Show your love for great stories, save them for later and then get back to them in times of need. Find stories to love!

-----

Once you're logged in, it looks sort of like a Kickstarter full of... blog entries. Some could be considered actual essays while others have pretty much posted lists, extended anecdotes, there's an iPhone 5 review, etc... The main feature I guess is that you can cycle through prompts from an array of categories to give you something to write about. Of course in the early stages they're pretty hit or miss, but I imagine there is potential if users ended up carving out their own niches– you might start to see more things like "How did you start programming? What do you think were the most important things that helped you grow?". Of course they're just prompts, and you should be able to write about anything you want.

I second this. They need to at least provide a sentence explaining what I can do with it.

+1--I'd like to be able to see an example.

I read the page twice trying to figure out what it is before I nixed it.

Here's a sample user page http://www.storylane.com/gauss

Weird that most of the users who i browsed through, seem to not be actual users and are just syndicated from existing blogs. (with the owners permission ?!)

Screenshot: https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/9zSroi6QLrBk8JpuJXo6Qk...

same as this user: http://www.storylane.com/scottbedford

a pity...

I also don't want to "sign up with Facebook".

There is an "old fashion sign up" right below..

Amazing design. But if I'm totally honest, it just looks like a blogging platform. I can't tell what's unique about it.

1) Make that ol' fashioned signup link just a little more obvious... 2) Could the two welcome emails be combined (can't the activation link come as part of the second if the subject line makes it clear)? 3) I couldn't help but laugh when "What are your best memories of graduate school? Worst memories?" came up as a prompt under "Life". There's something amusing about this question being posed so innocently after "Did you have a pet?".

Anyway I think the site is actually pretty fun, and I'm glad I signed up despite not being able to tell what it was just from the homepage (might want to change that). I was just about to go to bed and jot down a few things I wanted to write about the coming morning but after poking around I may just spend some more time poking around with some of the topics here.

Glad to hear that you liked it! And I hear you on combining the welcome emails

Recommendation to the founders: Change the flow:

1. Story writing. As a guest, let me write my story right away. Give a few story ideas.

2. Sign up. Make it optional. Tell me I can share my story anonymously but if I want to keep it forever, allow me to sign up then.

Nice design and concept. I could see myself using this, no doubt.

That said, I have some suggestions:

- Let me remove stories I don't like. Bonus points if:

-- I can drag them out to remove them (it was my first instinct, and I think it'd work well)

-- The system learns from that, after some time.

- Please, let the "bar" stay fixed. It's only distracting when I'm reading a story or enjoying a photo.

- Let me read more of a story in-place, by expanding the "card" (downward?).

Good work, and I'll be looking forward to what you build from here.

Thanks for the feedback.

- Like the idea od removing what you don't like

- I hear on fixing the bar.

Again, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts

With no info at all it feels like a dare.

Storylane is an effort to create a library of human experiences. technically it works like a publishing platform built socially from the ground up.

I like the sound of "A library of human experiences" - it grabs me more than "People sharing things that matter".

Perhaps there is an example or demo you could make public, to give less adventurous visitors (like me) an idea of what it does? (edit: like the /gauss link I just noticed - now I like it)

I'm all for stealth but IMO this is too stealth.

Thanks for the feedback.

We reasoned that the signed-in experience is a lot richer than what we could show signed-out on the landing page, but perhaps we should not take it to such an extreme :)

Well if by richer you mean know just what the hell it is, then yeah! :)

Point taken, and it seems to be a common thread. We need to think about how to do this better. The reason we care about registrations is because we look at it as a community not a marketplace for content.

Take your time.

Building a bad community, not setting precedent, training up people and solidifying a culture are pretty lethal to your stated goal.

Once you are open to all, your constant battle will always be:

1) Not let the Signal to Noise ratio degenerate 2) Be able to split the Signal down into sub categories for people to process, as opposed to a torrent which then leads to arbitrary discarding of significant data.

You bring two very important points. I agree that creating the right community and the right precedent is Key, but I don't think you need to be closed in order to achieve this. On the contrary, I think one needs to build a system that cana achieve that And be open. From our point a view, is actually an imperative: we Must be able to do it. We simply don't like close, invite only systems. The reasons probably will fit better in another thread.

With regards to managing signal to noise: 100% agree. Figuring out how to slice and dice the content so that you see what matters to You is our number one "tactical" objective. It is actually a hard problem, but one that gets easier as you come to understand the content being created and once you can benefit from enough liquidity to slice and dice at will.

Since upvotes aren't shown, I just want to say that I prefer "A library of human experiences" too. The current subtitle makes it sounds more like a social network for friends and families than a open community.

Thanks for joining in. I love that explanation too :)

Please, this is how you execute this idea......http://cowbird.com. I did not sign up because i have no idea what the product does and the alternate to Facebook login blends into the background and is hard to notice.

Some of those stories are pretty intense Ex: Nick Slater (Palantir's designer in Palo Alto) http://www.storylane.com/nickslater

It would be nice to see an OpenID login.

It would have been nice to have seen OpenID succeed into no-brainer non-geek use. As it is, it's like an artisan pencil that's really useful and no one's heard of, made of renewable bamboo pulp and non-toxic "lead" that can be erased with the non-point end which is merely an extension of the bamboo, shredded at the factory into a small brush. (Hey, did I just invent something?)

Your logo is similar to: http://codegram.com/

And also 8Tracks [1] if you say that a infinitive sign is similar to another infinitive sign.

*[http://8tracks.com/]

This sound like g+ - ppl sharing things that matter to me.

On your fb tag line you have padding that ruins your y's.

whoa, this site is looking good! love the use of subtlepatterns and conservative use of gradients on the buttons. who designed this?

this talented person is to blame for the design: http://dribbble.com/mhrescak

looks like a clone of http://www.remenis.com/

Simple WHOIS shows that storylane.com is online since 2003 (although this service probably wasn't there, but I am a user of storylane since about march 2012) and remenis.com was created on 18-Jun-12, so you've got that clone the other way around.

I know the founder of remenis.com he explained to me the idea in Dec 2011. But good luck to everyone, I was never super impressed with the idea in the first place. Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?

>> I know the founder of remenis.com he explained to me the idea in Dec 2011

That's good for him, but you can hardly clone something, that's an idea in someone's had, right? Thus it seems that - shocker - there was no cloning involved.

>> Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?

I bet that the authors can explain this better than I can (if they haven't yet in this post on HN)

Zorbo provides a good answer: Focus. Both in what the Tool does and also what it is used for; to wit, we created Storylane to build a library of human experiences and opinions. We created Storylane to focus on what matters. This is partly achieved by the tool itself and how it works, partly by the community and how is being collectively crafted. The key operative word here is actually "being" as in we have been doing this for a couple of weeks and the focus that I am describing is pretty much in the making

> Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?

My answer would be: focus. It's nice that you visited YetAnotherCon 2012, and created ten blog posts about it, but honestly, I don't really care.

Storylane focuses on telling stories. http://folklore.org, which does something similar, although even more focussed, is a fantastic read. My hope is that similar intriguing insights into people's lives pop up on Storylane.

Both of those look like a clone of http://cowbird.com/

How do you compete with subreddit?

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