Ask HN - Please help me improve my app (Twitter job search) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN - Please help me improve my app (Twitter job search)

twhired.com

23 pointsjraines9 comments

Dear HN,

The job posting/search arena in Twitter is wide open, so I built this little app. It's nothing special yet but I think a good foundation. It's human filtered and has full-text search. Where to go from here? I just noticed that #tweetmyjobs is a trending topic on Twitter -- how can I get twhired on there by making it useful to people? (A better source stream is one obviously, I'm using a pretty basic twitter search RSS right now. Pagination, location . . . what else? Would any Ruby/Sinatra folks like to work on it with me?

Open articleView on HN

I suspect #tweetmyjobs is trending simply because TweetMyJobs' many accounts hashtag it to every post they make. Their posts are automatically-generated got-to-fit-in-140 gobbledygook, and several of their accounts that I checked have been suspended presumably for their repetitive nonsense content. It looks like a developed-by-the-lowest-bidder infrastructure designed by people who haven't really thought things through (you're expected to register an account in order to see the list of Twitter accounts? And can only browse job descriptions by visiting those Twitter accounts and then clicking a shortlink that then links back to the site?). TweetMyJobs is, as far as I can tell, a mess. They're getting publicity only because their hashtag hit some Twitter mindshare event horizon and gave people something to talk about without needing to investigate too much on their own.

So, uh, I appreciate that you're focusing on making yours more useful. Long-term approval usually comes from products made with care.

While searching for a job, I physically am usually limited to a few applicable dimensions (physical location, field, experience range). If I could tailor the experience on Twhired to target those dimensions then it would make my interactions much more effective. A focus on mining or transcribing accurate location and field metadata plus an interface for drilling down based on those would be a good way to fit my needs as a user.

Trying to make the trending list by spamming didn't occur to me before. Interesting thought, although personally I never look at the trending topics. But I guess we'll see more of that spam approach in the future.

Here's a spammy thing I've seen that I expect to see more of "@JoeBlow is giving away a Widget! Retweet this for a chance to win!"

True, but luckily it is easy to unfollow the participants in such schemes.

Dear HN,

The job posting/search arena in Twitter is wide open, so I built this little app. It's nothing special yet but I think a good foundation. It's human filtered and has full-text search. Where to go from here? I just noticed that #tweetmyjobs is a trending topic on Twitter -- how can I get twhired up there by making it useful to people? (A better source stream is one obviously, I'm using a pretty basic twitter search RSS right now. Pagination, location . . . what else? Would any Ruby/Sinatra folks like to work on it with me?

1) Your search doesn't tell me anything when there are no results, Try searching for "DC" and you'll see what I mean

2) Auto-suggest would be really helpful in the search, to make it easier to make my location string well-formed.

3) Letting me just pick a state/city from a list craiglist style would be nice, although I can see how that would be a bit of UI clutter.

4) Some of your 'view this job posting' urls are broken, i see @jobshouts

#jobs Territory Sales / MKTG / Consulting Positions - F/T - \"Leads and Pre-Set Appts\" - (OUTSIDE SALES) in Atlanta,Georgia ...

leads to http://jobs/ You also appear to be escaping quotes in a way that's showing up on the homepage =P.

That's just from a few minutes browsing. Looks like it could be a useful tool, keep up the good work!

Picking areas is important in job searches. You do need to find ways to integrate it.

You need to look at similar features on major job search engines and integrate a few of them if possible. I knwo it won't work as well, but that woud be nice.

Also, the ability to turn a search result (i.e. design San Francisco) into an RSS feed.

Don't use "twa" in app names. It's tired like the flickr r. Also, many people don't know how to spell "twhirl", despite many thousands of users. I'll look at the actual app shorlty.

Your job posts on the main page look like google ads for some reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com