HN: Review my little Twitter app
glunote.com
glunote.com
The premise is pretty simple, just follow a user "glu" on Twitter then to take notes send a direct message to glu. The system then stores the note permanently, i.e, "d glu dicount socks 1-800-555-SOCK". You can then search notes by sending a direct message to glu with a ? as the first character. For example "d glu ? discount socks" would return all your notes that matched "discount socks" as direct messages (actually at the moment it returns the best match and a link to all other matches).
It was originally just for me but I've opened it up to anyone. I'd love to get some feedback on what people think, where there might be improvements, what's missing, that kind of thing. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
One feature I would love is a reminder system of some sort. I'm an extremely forgetful person and I could tweet notes all day long but would never remember to check time-sensitive ones. Could you add some functionality to retweet me reminders for time-sensitive notes? e.g. I could tweet "d glu meeting @6:30pm", "d glu do so and so @tomorrow @12:00pm" or something similar that could be parsed easily and wouldn't misfire.
"250 total direct messages per day, on any and all devices"
http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/15364
Im not sure if they will make an exception for you. I too wanted to us dm as a means of communicating, but having a limit of 250 in a day would just be crippling.
Perhaps an argument in your d glu would be to allow for "trigger word or phrase" then an open message would not be as bad.
Another option would be you send a tweet with a link. The page has a password which displays the message for the user.
Clearly on the mobile or something, not as important. But bringing them back via the web page. Allows you more options in terms of what to display.
I know you haven't mentioned nor asked. But a potential tier pricing scheme.
1) How many reminders per week / month
2) Maybe allow non paying users the ability to pick 15min blocks, yet allow paying users the freedom to create any.
I understand that in order for your app to work, the user has to be following the @glu account, but automatically opt-ing someone in is not the right way to do it. You need to update the content and design to make it painfully clear to anyone logging into your site that they are also consenting to following the @glu account.
The visual style is good conceptually, but needs polish. You need more than yellow rectangles for each note, the cork board background needs some kind of border, and your X buttons need to be more stylish.
Edit: I see that you really did intend it for the use I just described, but the language on the site makes it sound like it's for taking notes in class, meetings, etc. I think that a more descriptive phrase is "write notes" rather than "take notes."