Show HN: LiveNinja - a video chat marketplace to buy and sell expertise | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: LiveNinja - a video chat marketplace to buy and sell expertise

liveninja.com

26 pointswillaaye18 comments

Initial thoughts:

Way too much stuff going on. Why are you forcing my scroll to be messed with? Most sites that have *ninja in the name I immediately think of as immature. On /browse/ you have just WAY too much javascript happening. I'm tethering on a 3G connection on a train right now and it took > 30 seconds to load everything.

The ninja thing just needs to go away. I'm tired of ninjas not being sneaky asian dudes with swords.

"Yoga Ninja" just does not sound right.

Chuck Norris was as good as a ninja as any other.

I agree on the scrolling part, horrible.

We just shipped a fix for the scrolling on browse. If you can, please check it out ( http://www.liveninja.com/browse/ ) and let me know if its better for you. Thanks for the feedback as well :)

Is there a particular reason you're not allowing the browser to use its native scrolling behavior/scroll bars? It just "feels wrong" on my mac.

I like the idea a lot. I worked at a larger company who offered a consumer service like this for a while. We found that most consumers really didn't convert well for the service and we had to pump in lots of marketing to get results. The most popular categories were 'psychics' and 'health'. Basically people who had STDs and were embarrassed and people who wanted their fortunes told. That said, there was a non-trivial amount of cash in those topics...

edit- I forgot programming. That was a big category as students often wanted their homework done for them...

Thank you for sharing this info, very valuable.

Feedback: The image gallery type of thing on the search ninjas was neurotic on my machine and I'm running latest Chrome and Ubuntu. By neurotic, I mean that it jumped around quite a bit. Not smooth at all.

Take out "ninja." Yoga ninja? Golf ninja!? I just want a Golf Instructor...

Btw, what company are you going through to get the video chat? Did you do that yourself?

they are using TokBox[0], which offers a video chat API for web sites/iOS apps/Android[1]

[0] www.tokbox.com [1] android coming soon, alpha is here: https://github.com/opentok/opentok-android-sdk

disclaimer: i work at tokbox

Very nice. I have to give you guys a try.

awesome, let me know if you have any questions - ed [at] tokbox

Congrats on launching. The site looks great.

Some feedback:

* On the browse page, you should remove the ninja after the person's expertise. It makes it easier for the expertise to stand out when scanning the experts.

* It wasn't immediately obvious to me that the green circle meant that the ninja was available now--maybe something more obvious if you want people to start a session in an ad hoc fashion vs scheduling a future session.

* It might be useful to show the people an onboarding page with the type of help you could get from these ninjas.

The "Browse Ninjas" page has some extremely distorted photos. I am not sure if your tiling is algorithmic or what but it's probably not very appealing from the perspective of the people on that page (or the people seeking them out).

(edit: Firefox 15. Have not tested in Chrome)

Thanks for the feedback! It's a known Firefox issue and we are working to resolve it right now.

Congrats on launching! I love the idea - this is somewhat similar to clarity.fm.

The site itself is pretty but seems to have some UI issues which are slowing down the site.

They need a ninja to fix their page. Not very agile on the JS.

Why doesn't the button on the top right have a function?

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