Comment by aditya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aditya | Hacker News Reader

Love the nice clean interface, couple of points:

1. Definitely go mobile

2. Detect my location and immediately show me stuff nearby (there was a geolocation database on HN recently)

3. You're making me zoom in too much with those nice aggregated bubbles, at some point I just got tired

4. Socialight built a nice community, but they don't seem like they're going anywhere (incidentally they're based in NY too!) - they do some good things, like mobile strategy but the interface is hard.

5. Don't force the sign up before someone adds content, let them add content and then ask them to sign up or provide an anonymous nickname

6. Placemarking and location based services is a massive but very hard and less understood market, keep innovating and develop based on feedback - community is very important!

Re 5:

We did this on our new startup, and had a few complaints we are dealing with now. Just to make sure you avoid them:

1) if you redirect them to a signup page, make it SUPER CLEAR that their post/content wasn't deleted, that it is being stored until they register.

2) give them an alert as they are writing that they will need to be logged in to actually add it.

We had users complain that it wasn't clear that logging in would add their post, that they were afraid all that work had been deleted and it made them not want to continue. That wasn't the case, so we just had to add a little note, but still.

(We're also working now on just a lil ajax box that floats up above the post asking you to login, so you can see that your post is still there...)

Re 2

You could also use the google maps geolocation feature. You could implement that in 10 minutes. I agree it would help a lot, I clicked around for two minutes or so and couldn't navigate the site to non-clustered content near me in that time.

Here's how we do geolocation:

GMap2.prototype.displayHomeMap = function(geo_locate) { if (geo_locate && google.loader.ClientLocation != null && google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude != 0) { center = [google.loader.ClientLocation.latitude,google.loader.ClientLocation.longitude] zoom = 6 } else { center = [39.25, -96.6669]; //center of the US zoom = 4; } this.updateMap(this.baseMap.nodes, null, center, zoom, null) }

Thanks for the ideas! Especially #5, which triggered a discussion between us on how to do this the best...

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