Mention.net | Hacker News Reader

Mention.net

en.mention.net

35 pointsmvaxelaire30 comments

Everything about this passes the smell test but that pitch video. Dom Perignon, gorgeous babe, party, "bro"... yuck.

That's half the audience tuning out in 30 seconds, and some more bailing due to the low-fi cartoon look, contrived 'problem', and ratty video compression. It's all out of place with the otherwise solid site design.

Checking it out nonetheless. Thank you!

I felt the exact same way. The product looked great from the screenshots and I was hoping the video would show it in action, but instead I was presented with some pretty contrived scenarios that made me feel like this was some sort of NY party app or something. I'm not sure why you'd start with the "how this helps you get laid" scenario. But yeah, I'll still give it the benefit of the doubt.

Edit: Also why is the Mac app a .pkg and not just a regular ol' app?

Huh. I started with the video and closed the site. Didn't realize until I saw your comment that this wasn't a dudebro stalker thing like Girls Around Me.

I don't get it. The rest of the site is trying to be respectable.... which just comes off as really unsettling now after imagining it coming from the barhopping bro.

I get the core idea: alerts services are essentially ego-stroking services unless your corporation is big enough to reach PR critical mass.

But finding out who's talking about you is a graymarket use for this service. For a company to properly rationalize $240->$1200 a year for alerts, they have to feel this is a business tool.

Yeah, the video is verging on parody. You want PR, marketing and sales people to pay for your business tool more than you want free users to waste your bandwidth collecting false positive reports on their name... right?

And the likes of Meltwater and (to a certain extent) Factiva should be your competition, not good-enough and free Google Alerts

Maybe they took it down; now I want to see this video of awesomeness but can't find it!

I didn't see it on the homepage, but I'm assuming it's this one http://vimeo.com/50765644

Wow, that is weird. Why the hell would you translate your brand? Visiting the site from Germany is an instant redirect to https://en.erwaehnung.de/ (erwähnung being german for mention).

This was not made on purpose : trademark collision case with an existing german company :(

This one? http://www.mention.de/

Trust me with this one: You need a better domain for germany. erwaehnung.de is just terrible.

Feedback:

* Add option to restrict keyword(s) to headlines, titles, and/or keyword density. This is useful for generic terms that get mentioned frequently but aren't the actual topic resulting bad results.

* Domain blacklist, not just URL blacklist. For example, I want to block answers.yahoo.com and all region subdomains under it (eg malaysia.answers.yahoo.com)

* Why is it pushing me to download a native desktop app? I don't want a desktop app and the web app is quite nice.

I have been using Mention for the past couple of months and even though their UI is not quite there yet, they are way better then Google Alert.

The only thing that is very annoying at the beginning, at least for me, was that I received A LOT of false positive mention... So I had to "Train" it a bit but now it's all good.

I don't know if I missed it but a cursory glance through your dev docs[0] do not, imho, lay out your terminology. What is the difference between and alert, mention, mention task, etc.

Looks good overall. Can you talk some about your tech? Are you ingesting material and then polling via peoples interests? For example, Alice and Bob are interested in "Apple". Is there a query que with "Apple" in it that polls your db and alerts the people interested in the term "Apple"? Or is there some kind of push magic happening when material is ingested. I'm interested because I want to do alerting in some of my own apps.

[0]https://dev.mention.net/

This is awesome, really seems to solve all my Google Alert and filtered Google search problems that I have hunting out press mentons of our products.

If I flag a Tweet, will it remove other good Tweets? For example, I see this Tweet I'd like to flag as spam, but I'm afraid it will kill good Tweets:

Gaia GPS - Gaia GPS ScreenshotsDescriptionSPRING SALE - Gaia GPS is currently $9.99 (50% off)!Gaia GPS is the... http://t.co/e6l95crUL8

Google indexes too many garbage sites like AppAnnie and WorldAppz, so it ends up being hard to filter good results day-to-day, but I think Mention kills those pretty nicely.

I am a mention user for more than 4 months and it is far better than Google Alerts for me.

I received only 23 notifications with Google Alerts while I have received more than 1 thousand via Mention (tweets, blog posts, Hacker News comments, Reddit comments, ...). About 10% was false positive due to our Google Adwords campaign on the display network (some webpage with our ads was detected by mention).

At the end it is not perfect but it is the best tool that I have tried.

Why does the title of this post mention a funding round and link to the actual product? It reads like a TC-style blog post. It's very misleading and a lost opportunity.

The product is interesting and probably a good idea in light of Google's shutdown of Reader. Google Alerts almost certainly won't be around indefinitely and Mention.net can jump in to scoop up a user base once Alerts is shuttered.

Have to agree with this... The moment I heard Google Reader was shutting down my mind went to Google Alerts, which is an even more obscure product that few (if any) alternatives exist for -- or so I thought.

Well, this is annoying. They auto-redirect to Google Play if you open the link on an Android phone. Reminds me of those online news papers that actively peddle their viewer apps, when all I want is to open a god damn page to read. Could have asked if I want their glorious app at least.

Sadly, I didn't get to see the video. Apparently they took it down.

I didn't see the vid on the homepage either, but I think I found it http://vimeo.com/50765644

Ha! Nothing can hide in these intertubes :) Thanks.

I must say they're quite responsive. Took down the vid pretty quick and also removed the funding brag from the title.

I would, however, suggest this one: "mention.net - Google Alerts done right."

Speaking of comparing mention.net with Google Alerts. The socialmention.net is a better (free) alternative.

I did'nt see any alert in socialmention.net. In fact I did not find anything else than a google custom search box... not very useful.

They are specifically searching social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, the same as what mention.net does.

Google Alert by the way does not searches Twitter, Facebook.

Go visit the site right now, there is nothing there but a exactly what the parent post said: a custom google search on the 'blogs' tab.

I don't know what you're comparing. I am comparing mention.net with socialmention.net. One is free, the other is not. Both provide the same exact service minus few bells and whistles.

interesting use of node.js/backbone.js

Interesting that there is not only iOS/Android/web apps for this, but a Chrome extension and Mac Desktop app as well. I would've figured that this was a service could survive on a web app alone (with email service).

Nice!

Fantastic product

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