Show HN: Point – a Chrome plugin for private sharing and discussion on any website | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Point – a Chrome plugin for private sharing and discussion on any website

getpoint.co

62 pointsabhoopathy38 comments

This is a very nice extension, I've been thinking about building the same thing for years and never got around to it so well done, and thanks for doing a very good job of it!

I'm thinking about using it for getting feedback on web applications I'm developing, it looks like Point would be the perfect tool for the job.

My only worry is that I have absolutely no idea where or how my data is held. Does the information I add to Point become public?

Other question, how do I turn off Point for a given site/page? As nice a tool as it is, I don't want it on constantly (e.g. comment box, highlights etc.).

Sorry if I'm missing something, I couldn't find any information on your website.

edit: wording, additional question

Thanks! Glad you're liking it :)

As far as data and privacy, every article you share, and the comments you make are private to you and only the people you mention in the 'point'. So there's no sense of a public feed or public commentary.

Edit: that 'popular' tab you see in the dropdown is a bit fictitious for now, so nothing that you point will ever show up in there.

2nd Edit: Once you've pointed an article/site and have the comment box up, you can strip /#show-last-point from the URL to clear. We'll be adding a better way to hide or delete this soon.

> Point is currently only for desktop Google Chrome.

> Visit getpoint.co from your laptop to check it out!

This is very bad. I have absolutely no way of accessing it from desktop right now. If you at least told me what it is about I may come back later. Now I will definitely not.

We played with explaining it on mobile but found that it led to confusion. It's an unfortunate stop gap for now until we have a mobile experience, but certainly agree that copy and mobile landing page isn't the best.

Why not at least have the video available? most people visting your site at this point are probably coming from more affluent backgrounds, thus even if they did get to your site on their phone they likely have a computer and would understand a video explaining whats going on.

Good idea, we'll probably do this!

This is great!

I actually developed a very similar project called LightRaft that also lets you comment on any website. However, the difference here is that I'm serving public and open discussion, rather than private conversations.

There definitely seems to be a ton of potential for this to be a great tool for collaboration. I look forward to seeing where this goes. Keep it up!

Thanks Jesse! The concept of discussion around content is really interesting - both public and private.

+1 for LightRaft. It works everywhere on the web, and is unmoderated/uncensored. The quintessence of free speech.

Thanks for the support! Just one clarification though: it's user-moderated by voting. The comments won't be deleted but will auto-collapse with enough downvotes.

Cool stuff, one complaint is that my @ sign is most definitely not Shift-2, which was very confusing when i was trying to get past the onboarding process.

I've got a UK keyboard, so it's shift-' but you should probably just say "type @"

Good point! We've heard this a lot and will be modifying that.

This is kind of awesome. Really great landing page. Great testimonials - makes me feel like if I use it, I know many others will already have it (or will easily adopt when I share it). Screenshots are perfect - I know exactly what I'm getting myself into. You guys turned some great insight into a great product. Can't wait to use it myself.

quick edit - have you guys seen Spot.IM? I know this isn't exactly a competitor, but it's probably good to check out: http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/22/spot-im/

Thanks! Feel free to point us @Point Team when you're on the app. Would love to hear further feedback.

Wow, this is actually pretty amazing, fluid user interactions, non-intrusive, and very easy on the eyes.

Great execution -- it's an idea a LOT of people have tried to do (check app store for "chat with users on same page" or something, you'll see what I mean), and you guys really do a great job of it.

I'd love to see some assertions/information on what you do with data accrued on the app. Who are you sharing what I'm looking at with? are you deleting it as soon as you get it? are you storing it?

Thanks! Yeah, we've definitely seen a number of attempts at this over the years. As for data accrued on the app, every link you “point” is private between just you and any friends added to that chat. What you share isn’t broadcasted to a feed or anything. There is currently no delete option though, so the data—like that URL and the messages around it—remains stored in our database so that you can revisit the conversation any time. We also don't track your browsing history/habits outside of Point.

Big fan of Point - stumbled across the app when they went big on Product Hunt a few months back. Quickly spread it between my friends and we point back and forth almost daily.

Great app.

Thanks AVTizzle! Glad you and your friends are liking it so far.

Hey HN, my friends and I have been working on this extension for the past year. For the curious, we were frustrated with using email and chat for sharing & discussing links, so we built Point.

We've seen various iterations of this over the years, but we'd love to hear what the HN community thinks about our take on it. @shwinnabego, @wannatouchmyfro, and I are here to field your comments, and questions, and feedback!

It's pretty cool. Congrats on your effort. On suggestion, you can make it more less memory intensive. On my MBP/Chrome, my fan started blowing at full speed while I was using Point. I compared the webpage's memory footprint with and without the extension and the difference is huge. 109MB vs 60MB for my personal webpage. It's even more on the verge example.

Thanks a lot. What did you use to determine this? I am using Chrome inspector's heap allocation profiler and not noticing this difference. We're very interested in fixing this!

Hi, I used the Chrome task manager (Under more tools) to check the memory usage on the page with/without the extension. Perhaps the profiler can give you more info.

The point you make about not having to scroll endlessly through your inbox to find 'that link' is moot when using Point a lot, because you'll be endlessly scrolling through the Point app.

Also; what happens when the content changes and the quoted part is gone?

Would be interesting for for example QA teams when you include Dropbox integration with a screenshot option.

Good point -- though we are building a search functionality now so that won't be the case soon enough!

If the content on the page changes, the quoted text will still show in the point chat box. Definitely useful to comment on Dropbox files/links.

Still moot, my mail app has a search box as well.

Wasn't there something called tribal fusion or something similar many years ago, amongst several others.

Personally, I can't see the point, for example, if I were a product site, I wouldn't some 3rd party able to spew messages all over it, so at best, getting sites to pay you is probably not a business model.

But good luck anyway.

Actually, I think I'm referring to ThirdVoice, which was shut down due to lack of success, and websites didn't like it because it "externalized discussions" according to the wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

Also there are many other web annotation systems described here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation and the see-also section shows several failures.

As I said, I personally don't think this is a good idea, I can't see the point, but best of luck in any case, I guess at least some others are finding it useful.

"No idea's original, there's nothing new under the sun \ It's never what you do, but how it's done"

- Nas

Indeed, but what is different about your take on this idea that has failed many times in the past, apart from slick UI?

Note that for people without American layout on their keyboard the shift + 2 will not work. I had to set my keyboard layout to American for it to work - you should probably fix that.

Edit: Came off a little hostile, I like the idea otherwise and may try to convince my friends to use it.

Thanks Tangokat, We've heard this a bunch. Just for my notes, what keyboard are you using and what is the shortcut on that keyboard?

Was using DA. The shortcut would be Alt Gr + 2 (so the right side alt key).

The same thing can be achieved, in a maybe nicer way, with http://www.words4chrome.com/, a Chrome extension that does public comments in any page ans has already a lot of users.

I've been interested in something like this for a long time, I just with the community was larger, as it is right now there just aren't a lot of comments

Thanks, I hadn't seen this before. Though there are parallels in the medium we use, the products are quite different. We do quick, private sharing with friends - not public commenting.

Their website was down but I found it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/words/lgdfecngaioi...

Great idea. I liked the tutorial too.

I have some questions: Are you planning to release a firefox extension version? Is this going to be free? I wasn't able to find anything about pricing on the site.

Nice job!

Thanks! We plan on building for Firefox and safari soon! It will be free, with maybe some premium features.

Been using for a while. Much faster than copy/past/email and I share articles without worrying about clogging inbox's.

Can't wait for mobile!

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