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Show HN: Timeline.com

timeline.com

123 pointsrohamg54 comments

Wow. Excellent execution of an awesome idea. Seriously, I've always lamented the fact that news is never presented with enough background, and the fact that these articles allow the user to either get an overview or an in-depth history is really exciting. I currently use Yahoo News Digest for quick updates about the day's events, but this complements that form of news consumption very nicely and I could see myself using it often.

Minor point, the UI is a bit glitchy and sometimes the header bar shakes back and forth. Also, navigation from within stories is unclear - I couldn't figure out how to get back to the front page section. I'm not sure if the functionality isn't there or just wasn't working, but a swipe left to go back would be much more user friendly.

Well done, and congrats on launching!

Wow. Thank you so much for the positive outpour of support, we are near the point of tears of joy with today's launch!

I'd like to take a minute and get back to all your questions and comments:

* Bugs and glitches: please keep the feedback coming! This is a version 1.0 product, so we're standing ready to fix issues ASAP as they come up.

* Technology choice: the iOS app is entirely native, written in Swift. The API is written in GO, and the web app is Angular.JS. Very shiny new tech all-around!

* Native vs. Web: We have a native iOS app on the AppStore right now, all other platforms can access full functionality via our web app http://m.timeline.com

* Maps and geographical exploration: Can't say much except "coming soon". If you have an interest, experience, or actual technology in this area we'd love to work with you.

* Contributing: We'd love to hear from you, and we'd love your help. Shoot us an email: beta@timeline.com

Regarding maps and geographical exploration, I agree with you that should be at lower priority. I think start from events happening now such as news is a much better and more efficient way to foster the positive feedback loop. When the timeline module is more polished and with more resources, it could be a good time to explore the module for map layer. Eventually, combining both layers to have a tool that I dream of. I'm just someone interested in this because of how powerful I think it could be. At this moment, I don't have enough skills to bring it to life. Nice work.

http://m.timeline.com

Does not load anything for me on Safari with Ghostery on.

I think this is great execution but I'm not sure I would use it over Wikipedia. If I want to know the timeline of Boko Haram, I think I would get more objective and comprehensive timeline information, with sources, from Wikipedia's page on Boko Haram* than the Timeline.com page.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boko_Haram#2009

2 https://m.timeline.com/#!/stories/boko-haram-nigeria-history

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Timeline is a news app that appears to publish articles with historical context and an innovative UI.

Why would you compare them? Apples and oranges, imho.

That would not have been a cheap domain name to acquire, especially after Facebook rebranding 'the wall' as 'the timeline'.

And then there's the neighbours, Timelines Inc., who aren't shy at all: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-07/facebook-timelines-...

Just did a quick site price estimator, probably not super accurate but it said about 18k. http://www.siteprice.org/website-worth/www.timeline.com

I'm not sure how reliable that site is considering it's estimating the domain thehungergames.wikia.com to be worth $30.1M http://www.siteprice.org/website-worth/www.thehungergames.wi...

Also, insurance.com, which was sold for $35.6 million[0], was estimated to be worth <$29k[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_domain_n...

[1] http://www.siteprice.org/website-worth/www.insurance.com

Very, very cool. I'm skeptical about your chances of success (I feel like news startups are just behind music startups in terms of mortality rate), but I've been wanting something that looks like this for a good long while. I think the lack of this sort of resource has done a grave disservice to our understanding of world events. So, thanks a lot for agreeing with me, and acting on it :)

(n.b. I'm a mobile engineer at NBC News, and arguably in direct competition with these folks.)

I like the thought that has gone into expressing the app's motivations. As a curated app, I was interested in learning about the people behind it. Your About, FAQ/Editorial and Licenses section under timeline.com/about was fun to read. Too bad it was hidden away on the homepage. But, maybe you did this intentionally.

I'm in the process of working on a timeline-like design, non news related, so this piqued my interest.

I like the idea of presenting news with related articles for historical context. I don't think I'd download an app. But if it were a website, I'd go there to learn more about a current news topic.

Yeah, me too, probably.

Yeah I would love this to be a website. I tend to read news at work (!) on my lunchbreak, on my desktop, so would love this to be a website.

I planned a tool to combine both timeline and map to be a tool for history exploration. With geography layer and time together, history can be shown in a clearer and impressive way. If one set of those by one user can be called a set. When grouping multiple related sets from different users, it must be amazing. It could be a game changer tool for history research and education. Moving those "meta" data to layers we can easily understand is a dream. Hopefully, I'm able to see it happens soon:)

This is great. Will definitely be my go-to app to kill some time and catch up on things.

I noticed an odd sentence structure in an article though. Not sure whether this text was generated, wasn't copy-edited or I'm just not reading it correctly:

> Gadhafi's compound in Tripoli was connected to a web of secret tunnels. But they did not save him: the tunnels where Gadhafi was captured in a tunnel while trying to escape Sirte, his hometown, in a golf cart.

yep, 'the tunnels where' in the last sentence seems like a typo

This is beautiful. It really shows that a lot of thought has been put into it. Have you guys thought about using CartoDB's Oddysey.js[0] to integrate maps in your timelines? It seems both projects are very related to each other.

(Full disclosure, I'm a CartoDB employee, although not involved in Oddysey's development)

[0] http://cartodb.github.io/odyssey.js/

Why can't that be a website ?

Why do you have to make console-exclusives ?

https://m.timeline.com/

https://m.timeline.com/bower_components/angular-facebook/lib... Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT https://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js Failed to load resource: net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT app.js:4 Uncaught Error: [$injector:modulerr] Failed to instantiate module timeline due to: Error: [$injector:modulerr] Failed to instantiate module facebook due to: Error: [$injector:nomod] Module 'facebook' is not available! You either misspelled the module name or forgot to load it. If registering a module ensure that you specify the dependencies as the second argument.

Chrome/Linux Version 39.0.2171.95 (64-bit)

It's your ad/privacy blocker, FYI.

Not working for me on a fresh install of IE10. I.e. (no pun intended) not due to any sort of ad/privacy blocker.

Yup, this is an error on our end. We've got a fix for it in the next build. Thanks guys!

Doesn't work. I don't get the point of "mobile web". What in the world is mobile web? Web is a web.

Works for me.

And the mobile web is web tailored for mobile devices. Come on.

I was scrolling down and the page went back to the front page.

My gripe with secondarily calling your site "mobile web" while you primarily set it up as an "app", has its precedence in how Internet content increasingly being sold as a product by going after a specific market, all at the expense of the overall Internet itself.

That's a turn off actually.

I've been dreaming about a site like this for years. Casual newsreaders need context given to them in a friendly way so they can properly engage with the content. Vox.com explainers are one thing but this is even better. Kudos on launching!!

I LOVE anything that will add the needed context to news stories.

The article on Boko Haram is good. I like video and income map. The actual timeline functionality on the web view still needs some work. With a good timeline you can "feel" the differences in timespan.

Overall, I like the idea and the content. More please!

I think the servers must be getting killed because the mobile web version loads incredibly slowly or not at all.

Also @rohamg I think there are some compatibility issues. In Firefox for Android I see only the site logo on a gray background. Chrome for Android loads ... eventually.

Oh, Oh! ... dammit. I've been think about something like this for a while now. Nicely done.

_Absolutely_ love the insight of news being "the short tail of a very long string of events". Along with the promising execution this could well be one of those tremendously successful ideas that look trivially logical in hindsight.

No IOS device here. Trying to use the "mobile-web" app but all I get is an empty page with your logo then eventually Chrome asks me if I want to kill the page(on my PC) or nothing happening at all on my Moto G.

I don't have a mobile device, so I can't really tell what's going on. Can someone give a brief overview of what this is about? It's supposed to be a new way of browsing news, right?

The mobile web app works great on desktop as well: https://m.timeline.com

Can I ask, was this at all inspired by reading my blog post that I posted here last year?

Looks awesome!

http://jamie.st/blog/news-timeline-v2/

Looks like this has been developed using the famo.us framework? I only say this because the parallax effect in the video is very reminiscent of a famo.us demo that was there yesterday but gone today.

Their about page lists the licenses for several native iOS libraries (AFNetworking, etc) which suggests it is mostly native.

Dev here. It's all native. Our iOS team says, "some of the third party libraries we have are Objective-C, but we've only written Swift code."

With your servers seemingly being hit kind of hard, I'd recommend a refactor pass to using ng-bind over {{ }} syntax. Seeing unparsed expressions all over the place on your web app.

Hi grumblestumble, we're on it now. Thanks for the heads up!

Very small thing, but there is a space missing after the period in the tagline:

"..string of events.Timeline weaves those.."

Otherwise looks awesome!

Great eye, and thanks for the feedback! We'll fix pronto.

I love the tagline. It's short, sweet, and immediately gets the point across. Great job!

The only way to understand what does it do is by watching a video?

Pretty awesome idea. I'm willing to contribute.

Thats one premium domain...

It's gotta be part of the business strategy. If the business itself flops, they've always got the increasingly popular domain name to sell to the highest bidder.

pretty good domain name

just "pretty good"? When i heard of Timeline now, I think of Facebook. This domain worths quite a lot i think.

Great idea! Congrats

good idea, congratulations!

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