Review my startup: Revizr. You haven't seen this before. | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup: Revizr. You haven't seen this before.

revizr.com

131 pointskoops64 comments

This is really quite cool. A few thoughts:

- When I click "claim your identity," it should take me to the create an account tab. At this stage, why not make that the default tab?

- I'm no designer, but the tan / pink / fleshtone color isn't working for me. If it's dear to you, ignore me. I just redid my site's color scheme because people told me it looked like a developer's hobby project, not a business tool. I used http://kuler.adobe.com/ and was pretty happy with results. On a similar note, anti-alias your logo and save as a png (with a background if you don't want to alienate the ie6 crowd).

- The killer use of this, IMHO, would be the ability to integrate your technology into an already existing block of text hosted elsewhere just by dropping a line of js into the page (like http://www.apture.com/). I know that's not a tiny feature, but I imagine a lot of bloggers would love to offer this sort of "live editing feedback" on their blogs (and might be a paying audience). Either that, or provide tools to "publish version to blog" and have integrations for popular blog software.

- More on screen help. This is really hard, particularly for an interface that requires users change their behavior. We're so used to looking at text and assuming it's static that we need some tooltips or something that says "here's how to use _this_ text." Maybe something that can be dismissed once a user has seen it (that's what we're doing), but don't rely on your document creator to add directions on how to use revizr in the document directions. They're already advocating for you by using your tool; don't make their job any harder by making them explain it to people they want to use it with.

- "Tag the new version" -- tags are cool and useful and keep things organized, but why do I get prompted to tag my version when I advance to a version? I'm trying to do one thing and the software is asking me to do another.

Overall, it's a really neat app; a mix of google docs, wiki, and document publishing, with better change documentation and integration control tools.

Hope that helps, and good luck!

That's very helpful, thank you.

This is what I love about HN: a few minutes after posting, someone has clearly used the app more and thought about it more carefully than some of the tech bloggers who actually covered us.

"The killer use of this, IMHO, would be the ability to integrate your technology into an already existing block of text hosted elsewhere just by dropping a line of js into the page"

I double vote for this approach, for selfish reasons (i.e. I might be a customer one day). The reasons are clear: Getting to end users directly is expensive. It would be 'easier' to sell Revizr to vertical applications as a plugin and let them spend all that money.

However, that being said and being less selfish, I wonder if the world is ready yet to build web apps out of other web apps. I don't think so yet.

Scribd is a good comparison. They went ad-supported because that is probably the only model right now the market will understand, even if it is not viable. If the tables were turned and I was you, I would really want to charge directly for my costs like a proper subscription SaaS service. Here's a sobering take on Scribd's model:

http://www.mathewingram.com/work/2008/02/19/scribd-cool-feat...

Other comparisons are web-to-print (e.g. postalmethods.com) and web-to-fax (myfax.com) services, but people are more willing to pay for those because there are obvious hard costs for them.

I believe that your future is all about being a 'feature' rather than a 'product'. I suppose I'm saying you ought to explore this model alongside an alternate revenue stream that will keep you afloat.

http://www.revizr.com/editions

you're competing with google apps... plus corporate enterprise software (assumed to exist, though at my last job the tech writers just passed around word docs)

I triple vote for a drop-in, because the ability to get corrections from your audience is a unique strength of online writing, but having those nitpicky corrections inside substantive comment threads is a distraction.

So I like the idea of not just cool markup but a separate, distinct 'copyedit/corrections space' that captures this useful-to-many but annoying-to-others feedback.

I quadruple vote because whenever I see a typo, I want to fix it.

I wonder if the world is ready yet to build web apps out of other web apps.

They sure are, if you don't make it obvious that is what they're doing. The guy who makes the Thingys does fairly well for himself last time I heard.

Technical gloss: embeddable widget to provide SAAS-like functionality within your own branding.

Non-technical gloss: here's a magic spell. Copy/paste it to give your website a built-in (e.g.) project tracker.

He has a stable of them now, but I think the first was UploadThingy.

http://www.uploadthingy.com/

> "The killer use of this, IMHO, would be the ability to integrate your technology into an already existing block of text hosted elsewhere just by dropping a line of js into the page (like http://www.apture.com/)."

That would be neat. Certainly possible via a greasemonkey script or ff add-on. I've seen a few that do this kind of thing, either to share with other viewers (eg, http://shiftspace.org) or to grab text for personal notes or research applications.

Speaking of blog feedback, applying this kind of markup to "inlined blog comments" would be neat. There are js widgets and wordpress add-ons that provide simple inlining/annotation of comments on blog articles.

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Sometimes I'd like to be able to see what other editors have done. Is this possible? I wouldn't want to feel that we're all correcting the same spelling mistakes.

Another neat feature: automatic partitioning of file for different editors. Say I'm writing a long article or a set of articles. Automatically send different portions to different users. More efficient.

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Do you use version control under this? This feels to me like applying open source review process to text.

It is possible to see what other editors have done--it's a checkbox that the document owner sets.

There's version control here, but not git/svn.

word :-)

did you roll your own repo? i can see advantages to matching up with existing technology for portability and outsourcing of features... or did you need fine grained control of changes? i guess each change could be a git commit, with your tables annotating the commit id.

You could do this with RSS. Let me add an RSS feed to my account, and consider each new item in the feed to be a new revizr document owned by me. Consider changes to the item text to be authoritative changes, i.e. versions approved by me. Let me put a link in or around my posts that takes anonymous readers to revizr.com/from_blog/my_username/blog_guid where they can make edits.

This would make it a pretty viable "suggest improvements" tool for bloggers, very easy to integrate with any site that has a full text RSS feed.

> save as a png (with a background if you don't want to alienate the ie6 crowd).

You could also use pngfix, or super sleight, or apply the CSS hack manually to that one element.

There's a problem when your software doesn't fit into an existing category. You have to simultaneously explain what it is and why it's good. Revizr reminds some people of Track Changes in Word, and other people of wikis. It's neither, but a whole new way for readers to communicate with writers.

No matter what you think of Revizr, I'd like to say thanks to the HN community for pointing me to so many useful places on the web. I'm also grateful to YC putting on Startup School '08 which gave me the confidence to work on this full-time.

Nice app. BUT:

1, It looks a lot like the ( now defunct? ) ycombinator startup http://www.writewith.com/, which didn't gain any real traction.

2, For general purpose editing task, I find the realtime editor etherpad a lot more useful.

I came to mention that I definitely had seen this before...WriteWith performed a strikingly similar task in a very similar way, and despite pretty good execution (certainly very good technical execution, maybe not as strong as needed on biz dev or raising money) failed to go anywhere. I got the impression the guys realized somewhere along the way that they were building a cool solution looking for a problem...the market just didn't seem to be there. Maybe that was just that the market is not yet educated enough on rapid collaboration and shared creation (as Joe Kraus says, "being early feels a lot like being wrong")...but maybe it's something more serious.

I was pretty sure I'd seen this before too but writewith isn't ringing any bells ...? I do have a terrible memory. But the tag-line then puts me off before I've started.

Why wouldn't someone just use Zoho or Google Docs?

I do like your handwritten-style annotated edits, but that doesn't seem enough.

You definitely need to lose the mouldy pink though, with that heavy gray too, bleurgh. Don't take your design cues from hacker sites! Gray for the edit box parts that you're looking at all day, fine, not for whole site - it's bad juju!

Your logo is the inverse of Zoho's - which appears to be an attempt to create confusion (or it will to a high paid lawyer) and is also that of Novell's Zen application distribution system IIRC, I think they have lots of lawyers too. Why didn't you choose "R"?

fwiw

I think it's really cool looking. One thing that I think needs tweaking is the exact graphical representation of the edits. I think it's smart to try and replicate what it would look like if someone were to write on your document, rather than simply strikethrough words and the like, but I think you need to go further in that direction.

Right now the thin, angular red lines and tiny triangles don't communicate that association to me. They because they're so rectilinear, regular, and small, they just look like busy interface crud that's obscuring my text. They therefore have no semantic content to me and I find myself having to consciously interpret them, in exactly the same way I interpret the weird strikethrough/underline scheme of your competitors.

This looks like an area where you might have to find somebody with a real professional eye; actually managing to implement the precise and rich graphical look you need in order to make your new idea work won't be easy, but I think it's hard to ignore.

Functionally this is awesome - we use etherpad a lot for collaborative text editing but having something a bit more structured like this could be very useful. The experience of entering a rewrite and having it broken down into several distinct edits is great, and there's lots of thoughtful touches in the UI (like starting off as anonymous and "claiming" vs. having to create an account up front).

Visually there's a lot of work to do - if you can get even a day or two of a great web designer's time it will be very worthwhile. For example, although you describe the two icons as "pen" vs. "pencil" they just look red and yellow to me - and then they both create (different kinds of) red text. Your logo needs to be antialiased.

On the pricing page, it's clear that there's lots missing from the free editing, but it's not clear what the free edition actually does provide. It seems like you can still use it to create private documents, but that's not obvious from the description. You might want to have some more rows on that comparison table that have checkmarks all the way across.

One group I can imagine loving this is lawyers, although they'll hate that it's hosted. You'd probably need to add more features but it would be interesting (if you haven't already) to talk to some and see if there's a custom version you could build with workflow targeted to contracts.

"Lawyers...[will] hate that its hosted." More accurately, lawyers will refuse to use this service b/c it's hosted and it raises unsettled issues related to the boundaries of client confidentiality. In many states, this service could even be considered unethical (read: illegal for lawyers) for use with client matters b/c it may either (1) be considered a waiver of confidentiality or (2) be considered a breach of confidentiality which the client has not waived.

However, I can imagine that students or nonprofits would love this, since those sorts of issues will not apply.

I second the "hate that it's hosted" aspect. You'll get the same issue at large companies too. The truth is commenting and reviewing sucks. Even when I was at Microsoft everyone complained about it when they did their specs. I definately see this as a value added add-on. Possibly by wrapping it into a plugin for hosted blog platforms or desktop programs.

I think the functionality is great, however I think you should reevaluate your color pallet. Choosing bolder colors would be a great first step in my opinion.

I own the domain wordsmither.com

I was going to do something different, but similar targeted towards small bits of text. If your interested in discussing, contact me on twitter (same username).

You can't say "You haven't seen this before" when you were covered on ReadWriteWeb 2 weeks ago -- that means a lot of us have seen it before. ;)

That said, it is a cool app. Nice work. One critique: There was no easy way that I could see to show the document with out edit marks. I.e., there should be a way to switch between showing the document with edits implemented by each editor.

I make my living as an editor, and when I'm editing in Word with track changes I often like to view final with the edits hidden so I can read through what I've changed and make sure my edits are good. The edit marks get distracting and make heavily edited docs hard to read.

Also, add in the ability to easily push edited documents into Wordpress, and I could use this at work. ;)

I think this is really nicely done. I have looked at solutions like this in the past and found them really lacking in terms of what text can be selected and how the selection is indicated -- and it looks like you have gone way beyond what I remember seeing.

Last year I created a prototype to play with some ideas that are similar to this, except that I created my application using Flex. It is here http://www.annospace.com for comparison. However, my interest at the time was only in social commentary and organizing lots of comments, not in group revising/editing.

Some feature requests that would make this VERY useful to document-centric companies like the one I work for now:

- Allow me to specify reviewers via e-mail. The reviewers should have roles (whose names the admin should be able to specify). Some should be required, some should be optional.

- Let me export a CSV or similar of the review comments, their owners, and the location in the document where the comment or change occurred.

- Let us run it on our own servers. Provide a downloadable version.

This would easily be able to replace our Excel review log/Word doc e-mails that I get every day...

Sell an enterprise version for use in intranets. Hire a good salesman to sell it. This is a great replacement for Word documents that are manually versioned (to create a paper trial).

This is an outstanding idea and distinct from current GoogleDocs or other wiki implementations precisely because it's asymmetric (one owner, many commenter/editors). I think you could enable a business model based on remote copy editing by 3rd party labor where the owner has the ability to accept or reject the changes. I can definitely see this as being offered as an alternative to the basic browser WYSIWYG editor for blog and wiki systems where the user ask for help with final edits or copy editing. I see a lot of potential for this. We did some research a while back for a wiki startup and this supports a mode that some prospects were asking for which wikis today do not support: an individual owns the page and can accept or reject additions/edits. This is different from the wiki model but appropriate for many projects (or as a finishing step where a lot of peer review/development has already taken place in the wiki).

Very cool!

Just take good look in the design, the point that should be improved is the presentation, works on a landing page, improve you logo, the design of the page and it should help you to get new users.

The features are awesome, the idea is more than awesome :D, BUT if you reduce the number of clicks to execute the most common tasks it would be amazing also.

Congratz!!!

Very cool. One problem I have is that the edit menu feels a bit laggy to me - it takes a short while for it to open. Also, when you're clicking around the document, I would want more instantaneous feedback on what's going on, if anything. I have the sense that it is just slow.

It was slow for me too. I would click and wait for something to happen. Just when I decided that my click hadn't done anything, the blue arrow with the pencils appeared, but I was already clicking the mouse so I had to wait again. This made it difficult to get the hang of and it was very frustrating. Anything you can do to speed it up will be a great improvement.

When I tried out Revizr(only a very quick pass-through so far), my first impression was that this doesn't sound that innovative, but then I read more and realized that it's a really cool idea.

Unfortunately, then I saw how Revizr displays changes. Several of the examples look ugly to me(especially the differ example), and the way moving blocks of text is notated seems like it may be slightly confusing with regard to where the block is being moved to.

That said, despite my dislike of the notation, ‍I really like the idea.

A minor complaint is that the bold text displaying one's username isn't a link, which wasn't obvious until I tried clicking it from several different locations. I think it would be better to fold the "Home" link into the username text.

I like it. Only negative for me was that it didn't seem to recognize my open ID (@gmail). But I did find it fast and intuitive. Too bad I'll never be able to sell my technophobic boss on it (who tends to sit at his desk and dictate micro-edits to marketing copy but also insists on receiving everything as email attachments).

I have some textual suggestions, but I'll add them directly on your home page when I get to the office later :) On a more general level, perhaps you could aim the community version at the wiki-using market, which might speed your adoption.

Clicking the little icons each time (especially since they don't stand out from the text very well) is a bit tedious. I noticed selecting and typing automatically defaults to "revise". This is a great feature. Are there keyboards shortcut for adding a comment?

The move text functionality is probably the weakest link. Why do I keep getting the message "Can't move content like that."? Also, it would be greatly enhanced with drag and drop ability.

My business partner recently gave me the book "Confessions of an Advertising Man" (by David Ogilvy) and one thing that struck me is that ad research data shows that using photos of people (as opposed to nothing or to sketches) in marketing dramatically increases interest in the product/article.

Your home page is very informative - great. But maybe sprinkle one or two photographs alongside the text?

who doesn't buy when they see a hero shot ...

;0)

My friend does copy writing and editing for a living. These are her thoughts:

  (8:33:14 AM) Laura: this editing software is cool but impractical
  (8:33:28 AM) Zach: why?
  (8:33:39 AM) Laura: you have to highlight to delete things
  (8:34:00 AM) Laura: where with track changes you can just write over it
  (8:34:45 AM) Laura: it looks cool once you've changed stuff

There's some secret practicality in there: select and start typing, and it will write over.

I found the page rather hard to read and it took a "long" time until I understood what it is all about. Putting the text in 2 columns might help. Not sure about the serif font too.

Nice idea. I like it. The revizr name does not appeal to me though, it sounds a bit too fresh and young. My first association was a razor and green/metallic colour, heh.

The logo has some weird spaces ("kerning"?).

Quite good, I didn't try the functionalities, but it will be very helpful for me.

I'm trying to write some articles and as I'm not native I get help from other people who master English. We use IM for that, so there's lot of problems especially we can't have the exact time to meet and be online.

I think your app can solve my problem so they revise my writing and then I see the correction.

Nice work!

You realize that by stating "You haven't seen this before", you are just challenging readers here to find and name products and projects that are similar to yours, don't you?

Although I have to say, the editor that pops up for "Rewrite selection" looks extremely nice, although you might get in trouble for basically aping the look and feel of Word.

Yeah, it's a smart move; motivating the HN community to research your competitors for you is very resourceful

regarding comment above: You realize that by stating "You haven't seen this before", you are just challenging readers here to find and name products and projects that are similar to yours, don't you?

http://jwz.livejournal.com/847649.html?thread=16493345#t1649...

I think you want to distance yourself from Word as much as possible. Look at Google docs even. The interface could use a sleeker look. But I like the idea and the execution a lot.

I disagree. Why?

Well for one, couldn't Microsoft complain that the interface to one of their products is copyrighted?

The part that looks like Word is TinyMCE. It's a great package, the best of the many editors we tried (including homegrown, twice.)

I'm surprised nobody has compared this to google's wave yet.

If you haven't, you should go check out the demo -- I'm not for sure yet how much feature overlap there is, but their demo exhibits a wow factor that is undeniable.

It's long, but skip around and you're sure to hit on at least some of the important bits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

It could easily be a gadget or extension for google wave, the protocol is already there.

What does this site do??

Maybe I am having a display error (Firefox 3.0.11 on Ubuntu 8.04), but I am not seeing anything that gives even a clue as to what this website is supposed to do.

EDIT: enabled cookies and I can now see the instructions. That seems like a problem. I normally never surf to unknown sites with cookies on...

Yeah, it's a pretty dire failure mode. I wouldn't be inclined to whitelist your cookies if I don't know your code fails without them and I can't even tell what your site is about. The front page is actually readable without turning javascript on, so it would probably help to just skip whatever it is you're trying to do.

I don't have time for a full review at the moment, but this reminds me of a widget offered by http://goosegrade.com/

Different approaches, but seems to be very similar functionality. (The interface barely worked for me with FF2 and Vista).

Just a quick question from someone who has worked on a similar app before. How are you importing word documents? When I was working on something like this every solution was either extremely convoluted or very unreliable (AbiWord was basically all I could find).

OpenOffice.org. It outputs nice, standard XML and keeps tabs on the bewildering variety of things that ".doc" can mean.

Great, now all you need to do is integrate it in a service like fanstory.com or fanfiction.net. Users could then point out all the writing mistakes perspective authors make as they read, beautifully and elegantly. Beta-readers would love it.

Cool, but I would be worried about its remarkable similarity (functionally) to Apple's iWork.com. They serve the same purpose, and although Apple's offering has less features for now, it is integrated with their iWork suite.

Pretty cool! I can see this being used in the classroom a lot.

I think I spotted a small bug. When I triple-click somewhere on the page then it locks up my firefox solid for a few seconds. Other than that: nice work!

I'm curious, how are you dealing with the embedded markup in HTML? I imagine it makes it really difficult to keep track of overlays, no?

I don't even have NoScript on this Firefox and it won't load... are cookies required to even see your page?

yes cookies are required. I use the private browsing mode formost sites unless its email or google services. Helps instead of dealing with enabling/disabling cookies

I could see this working as a gadget in google wave as well.

This is very very cool.

Unfortunately, the UI sucks in Safari and basically doesn't work.

I would try to cut to the "this is an editable document" chase in the second paragraph. Maybe even the first. Probably the first. Definitely the first.

Awesome idea!

Just in case anyone's interested there's an competitor called http://www.redliner.com

Great You should submit it to http://AppUseful.com

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