Two months of hard work. What do you think of my startup? ZoooV.com | Hacker News Reader

Two months of hard work. What do you think of my startup? ZoooV.com

zooov.com

31 pointswaleedka43 comments

Note: I had to put the description here because it didn't show below the title.

So, this is my second attempt at building something people want. How am I doing? ZoooV is a social news site for niche subjects. Here is why I built it:

With the big social news sites: Digg, reddit, and recently after the name change, news.yc, the discussions tend to become more general as the communities grow because we, the readers, have different interests. And because of that, only what's common to everyone goes to the top. Smaller communities have more focus, but it's hard for them to survive because there is less to read, and therefore, we tend to visit them less often and eventually forget about them.

I'm trying to solve this by keeping the communities smaller and focused, but allow the individual reader to choose the communities they like and I create a custom page for them where they only see what they're interested in. This way, even though the individual communities might have low volume of stories, the reader will always find something interesting to read in one of his communities or the other. It's like how an RSS reader allows us to keep track of low volume blogs because we don't have to remember to visit each one of them.

i like the idea of customized social news gathering, but i'm not sure if a community structure is the right way to do it. i don't think most people want to limit themselves to a particular community of stories. most of us have pretty broad interests and, while we may want to read more about a particular field over other fields, that doesn't necessarily mean we want to read ONLY about that field.

i envision a system where you sign up for an account and you subscribe to your own personal RSS feed with content similar to Digg/Reddit and over time the site learns your interests based on the stories that you click on from your RSS reader. each feed would have user-generated tags associated with it and will begin showing more (but perhaps less popular) feeds that share tags with feeds that you've previously viewed. over time, your personalized RSS would contain only feeds that it knows you're interested in, and the random feeds it included at the beginning in order to learn your interests would gradually be phased out.

the layout of the site is great though. i'm just not into the community/forum idea too much.

I guess there might be a misunderstanding here. The idea behind Zooov is that you can join multiple communities at once, not just one. Then, your home page will show the communities you joined all in one page (but in separate sections, like Google News).

Your idea addresses the same problem from a different angle, and it's a good idea, actually. Though it's much harder to implement.

I don't really see how this is much different from my.reddit.com, but I could be missing something...

EDIT: sorry, I jumped the gun before I started reading more of the discussion. I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

I think The WELL was structured similarly to this site.

Lol. When I landed on the home page, my first thought was "Why did this guy post a link to a site that hasn't launched yet?"

I thought it was one of those parking pages chock full of ads. You really might want to change the design a bit...

Yes, I do realize that Web sites with ads are sometimes looked down upon, especially in the tech community. Because that's how I used to feel. But recently I started embracing the fact that ads are what makes the Internet free. Without them, we'd have to pay 5 cents for every email and 15 sent for every search. I'll see what I can do about the design, though. Maybe I can make it less "messy".

And, none of the ads on the home page are paid, by the way. They are links to other very good startups[1].

[1] http://selfdebugging.com/2007/09/24/list-of-selected-startup...

No, he means the entirety of your site looks like a domain squatting ad page. Most domain squatters put categorized ads on their pages, and your links look similar to that. Have a think about the design of your content. But two thumbs up for the idea.

I agree. My first thought was "Hmm lots of big adverts.. what else is here?". Then I read and realized.

I like the idea, but don't really like the look. Kind of messy.

And the "niches" that I'm seeing are: "Beautiful mind", "Post launch", "Break time", etc. Those aren't niches but uber-vague references to niches.

These are the ones I could think of. Hopefully, people more creative than I would suggest new subjects that are more interesting.

> ZoooV.com

> Read amazing stories submitted by amazing people, like you.

Always make your users feel smart. Nice touch.

Congrats!

The front page seems a little noisy.. Perhaps the box on the right that explains what the site is about could be colored to draw attention to it?

I'd like to see a service like this designed for easy exploitation of 3rd parties like myself who want to create a social news community for their own organization/website, but don't want to have to run it off their own server (I don't want to have to install and manage one of the digg/reddit clones myself). It could remain 100% public and controlled by ZoooV, and I simply add a snippet of code to make it available on my site with all interactivity enabled (No, I don't want to just include an RSS feed, I want it to feel like my own site's community area).

I don't see why the functionality of reddit/digg couldn't be applied to small/medium-sized groups with great success. I don't see anything about this style of interaction that makes it exclusively valuable for catch-all site like reddit.com or digg.com. I think it could/should become a standard feature for all kinds of intranets / blogging platforms / website providers.

For example, I might start a community called 'Product Development in China' and integrate it into my website, or my Ning social network, or my FaceBook Group... then if some of my friends (or strangers) like it, they can add it to their websites/blogs as well.. soon enough the ZoooV community is getting a lot of users as a result of exposure on these 3rd party websites...

Maybe the feature set I'm looking for is available elsewhere (is it?).

I think it's got potential, but you should work on your design and copy. It wasn't obvious to me at all why I should use it over instead of one of the many popular "social news" sites. For inspiration, take a look at what 37signals does with their products.

When you've got a startup that essentially revolves around one improvement on what vast numbers of competitors are already doing, you've got to make it blindingly obvious what I'm gaining by using your app.

Cool!

Ask HackerNews: How many of you were working on pretty much the same idea? I was :-(

I understand that its niche subjects but I wouldn't describe it that way in your tagline. Its doesn't sound very interesting. I also wouldn't say "social news". keep it simple. Say: news about "all" subjects (instead of niche) or "new/fresh links about the topics you want to read about" or something along those lines.

Also where it says "Customize this page to see only the communities you like", "Communities" is too confusing to someone just landing on the page. And the names of the communities are kind of cool but too confusing. When I read "Beautiful Mind" I glossed over it.

This could really work if executed right. I think tighter focus might be something that could partially solve the social news "lowest common denominator" problem.

This kind of feedback I can only get from someone seeing the site for the first time and reporting their first impression. Thanks a lot. I'll see what I can do about it.

I like your execution: the site just screams quality, and I would surely read it if there was content. But I am not convinced this is different enough from reddit with more categories, or "communities" how they call them. And they (reddit) are adding more.

Can someone make their own niche site themselves, or do you have to make it for them?

They can't yet; but the plan is to allow it later. I need time to understand what's involved in building a community and maintaining it so I can put the right governance model in place. For example, if someone creates a community, do they get the right to censor it? Who decides what's considered spam and what's not? Voting or the admin? Things like that.

I think you should plan on making that a feature ASAP. My interest level just went down when I read that it's not available now. Giving people the tools to create a community is a very powerful concept.

I think your idea could really work waleedka, get that feature out now and refine it as you go.

I like the concept.

However the question is, why would people go to this site as a destination instead of a niche site itself. Example: If I wanted to learn about internet marketing news - which isn't covered by digg, reddit etc, i'd go to plugim.com which is focused on that. Why would I go to zooov as a destination site? and then would you be able to build an audience enough for each and every niche. That's the problem with building a site that's wide enough ...

good concept though - good luck.

I believe (or hope) that it's not an either this or that situation. I read digg, reddit, and news.yc. Each has a different flavor. My favorite is news.yc because of the narrower focus and the quality of people, but I read reddit when I'm looking for random stories.

The community boxes look like ads.

The page looks good, I like the layout, the only thing I would change is the header.

About cool the startups sidebar, that would make a great community!

What do you think about that?

I think it would be great if we have a community for low-budget startups to help each other. Getting new users is hard. And you don't get a real appreciation for how hard it is until after you launch. That I learned from my last project. So, I created the "Post Launch" community because I realized that there must be a lot of people in a similar situation like mine: launched and trying to market their startup. I hope we can use it to share marketing ideas, arrange banner exchanges, and so on. Is that along the lines what you're thinking?

Not sure it matters too much for sites that have login page that aren't https, but better not to email people their passwords (clear text). It also indicates you're probably storing passwords in the clear, see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html

What languages/frameworks did you use?

On the server, ASP.NET and the free version of SQL Server. On the client, the Yahoo UI library, which I highly recommend, and a lot of hand written javascript. But I tried to avoid being too fancy with AJAX, so I used it only for things like editing in place and voting without reloads.

The only fancy AJAXy thing I have is the bookmarklet. Which is kinda cool, if I may say so myself :) I haven't seen any other web site use something like it.

Yuck, asp. Why did you choose .net over lamp? And I agree, the Yahoo UI Library is awesome.

I have the same question!

Stick with it. Nice start. I like the improved logo from last time i looked as well.

I found 3 interesting articles I hadn't read before right away. Thanks!

This is pretty cool! Your idea is good, but the implementation needs improvement. Please keep working... if done well I'm pretty sure I would use this!

So.. like a web forum meets reddit/digg?

Exactly.

Keep up the great work waleedka. The site looks much better from when I last looked at it.

Mark

For some reason, parts of that site look extremely familiar...

Nah, I'm crazy.

good work, i think you didn't waste your time... your article amazing and new..

Great idea!

oh common. yet another rippoff. this web 2.0 is getting silly.

dig+reddit+collegehumor+??? = profit

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