Show HN: You Write. We Quantify – thoughtly.co | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: You Write. We Quantify – thoughtly.co

11 pointsmercurialshark16 comments

I created Thoughtly because many of my hobbies and interests - things I spend a lot of my time learning and writing about - are not reflected in my resume or in any single online profile.

Written discussions online are generally insulated within specific communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Blogs, etc.), making it difficult for users to retain their credibility as they cross platforms. So we set out to quantify written discussion online and display them in a centralized portfolio. By enabling people to quickly display the extent of their involvement in a field, we provide context for online discussion. Your Thoughtly signature is a link to your online profile - which displays a summary of your written contributions online.

It took a better part of a year to spec out everything and build a tool that sufficiently processes and accurately aggregates written content. We also think that natural language processing is a hole in the quantified self movement. Words can be valuable data too.

Thanks and I'm excited for feedback. :-{

thoughtly.co

Update: It currently takes a few minutes for the server to process connected accounts and issue credentials to your profile! However it is working, hang with us for a few minutes.

This touches reputation, authority, credibility. Quantifying the corpus of individuals, across sources, is a tremendous undertaking. Very cool concept and I'll be checking out your execution following this comment. I'll post feedback here or via dm if I don't see another preferred mechanism in your app.

Exactly, thanks for checking us out. While we avoided grandiose statements like "we quantify you," a person's performance and engagements overtime if carefully quantified add tremendous value to depicting the essence of the person. For example, I read and write significantly on science related issues but have no hard science background. Without quantifying my online discussions, that aspect of me is essentially lost when creating a resume or profile.

Make sure to check out your webprofile (via Thoughtly signature), as it supports data visualization, which is coming very soon to iOS.

I'm pumped to hear your thoughts!

Feel free to email me directly perkins[a]thoughtly.co

Is your analysis able to answer the questions "Is a sentence true?" and "Is this paragraph true?" That's something I'd like to have.

We want to avoid subjectively stating what is definitively true, as this can be a moving target and we encourage dissent. Fields grow and horizons broaden, however our algorithms do sort what is/isn't applicable to a field and the quality/relevance of the content to a specific category!

I have been craving for something like this for Facebook. I've had so many interesting conversations with friends over the years, I wish I could extract all of that stuff and use it as drafts for essays. Cool work you're doing.

Right there with you. I love the fact that I can now pull together the metrics for all of my shared posts and content. This can really make it easy for people to quickly gauge someone's topic authority.

Thanks! That's definitely something that we think is missing and I hope you check us out. We started with blogs/scholarship/reddit/Q&A sites, but are adding Twitter/FB next. While many people have quality discussions worth aggregating and quantifying on FB, we were worried that it might dilute our initial product. I appreciate the feedback and hope you like it. Our next version - which is en route to completion - will feature data visualization of written content on iOS (which is currently available in an early form on the web profiles).

How do you envision your users will use their Thoughtly signatures? Can the signature feature be used anywhere?

There are two obvious uses, but many we have yet to consider.

The first is on resumes, where context for life experience and outside interests is missing. As we move away from degrees to skills, the importance of quantifiable involvement in an area is increasingly valued! Secondly in comment sections and social media. It's easy to throw around statements online, but I think it would be great to be able to demonstrate both conventional (scholarship) and unconventional (Blogs, Q&A, Reddit, etc.) experience to speak with authority everywhere...

Clickable: http://thoughtly.co

Good call, thanks.

This is a great idea. Glad someone is pulling this together

Interesting idea, but why is it an iOS app?

Thanks and that's a good question. Well Thoughtly is just starting as an iOS app, we are about to launch the fully functioning web app.

The main reason it's on mobile is so people can just one click, copy their signature (which is a link to their quantified profile) from the app and paste it into any other platform, forum or app they communicate on. Since no one wants to engage in long conversations on a phone, it's simply easier to drop in their signature wherever they like to display experience.

Furthermore, Thoughtly has an activity feed that is really just a discussion board. But it allows you to browse for content/news in categories you find interesting (like flipboard) and see the objective experience and interests of the people who shared the content/involved in the discussion.

This is basically the idea behind Google authorship.

Thanks for the feedback. While Google Authorship touches on the same problem, a comparison however is not accurate.

Our natural language processor identifies the category of each specific contribution, issues credentials if the contribution is sufficiently relevant and aggregates an individual's involvement in various fields. So instead of reading a list of the person's written work like you would on Authorship, Thoughtly displays a summary of their involvement and turns their words into actionable data - allowing users to forgo displaying specific work (like on Reddit).

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