GraffitiTim

Topazon is a side project that aggregates and curates the 100 highest rated products on Amazon.com. The information was gathered by going through Amazon category by category and manually collecting the products with close to 5 stars and enough reviews (usually over 50) to make the rating significant. Some judgement was applied, for example picking a 4.7 star product that was $150 cheaper than a comparable product with 4.8 stars.

Note: the links to Amazon have an affiliate tag. If this bothers you, feel free to copy paste the links without the tag instead of going directly.

I just added a custom Google Verbatim search engine to Chrome with keyword "gv", so I can type "gv testing" in the URL bar and get a verbatim search for "testing".

To do this, go to the "Manage Search Engines" section of Chrome preferences (Firefox has a similar feature somewhere) and use this URL:

https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&tbs=li:1

How does this work?

Thanks! We're working on getting some high profile people, as well as other topical and/or interesting people. It takes some time but I think our "flow" is improving.

If anyone knows someone who could do a great AMA (of any sort), we'd love an introduction.

Jason Rohrer is a solo developer whose game "Chain World" was the subject of a popular HN post a few days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2778458

He already weighed in on the top comment from that thread, about Chain World branching into multiple copies.

Comments are coming; answers can already be edited

We now prompt only for read access. Later on we might add back in some options to grant read+write access in order to more deeply integrate it with Twitter.

Twitter login now prompts for read-only permissions, instead of read+write. I think that was the most popular suggestion from the HN crowd. Thanks all.

We don't use those, twitter doesn't have a fine-grained permissions system.

Thanks. I think we're going to lift or lessen the constraint on question length. We were trying to have them fit in a tweet, and also we noticed that most interview questions are relatively short, but we've gotten that feedback quite a lot.

We're not republishing content and I don't think we're ripping off r/iama. I think there's a lot of advantages to the "Ask me anything" concept being its own site, as I mentioned in the previous thread. And reddit also isn't the first to implement that idea.

I love feedback about AnyAsq but I think the most important thing about this link being on HN is the opportunity to ask questions of someone on the Google+ team and see his answers.

Sorry, we're working on allowing other login mechanisms. The publishing permission is so you can tweet out questions you ask easily if the box is checked. We never misuse any permissions.

He goes into that in this answer: http://anyasq.com/69#377

We're YC S11. AnyAsq is our weekend side-project that was accidentally launched a week ago when Harj (without knowing that AnyAsq was by a YC company) started "I'm a partner at Y Combinator. Ask me anything", and someone posted it to HN. We've had several other interesting people start AMAs as well, and we're excited about the response so far. We've had 25,000 visitors.

Startups interviewed: AirBnb, AppSumo, Blippy, Bump, Cloudkick, Crowdbooster, DailyBooth, Divvyshot, Djangy, foursquare, GitHub, Gobble, Greplin, Grooveshark, Hipmunk, Husky Starcraft, Indinero, Justin.TV, KISSmetrics, LikeALittle, Listia, Little App Factory, Mixpanel, Noteleaf, Octopart, Omnisio, One, One Llama, OrangeQC, reddit, Weebly, WePay, Wufoo

Thank you!

I'm wondering if they might be planning to transition to a more granular permission system like Facebook, since they recently started displaying the permissions more granularly and it would make a lot of sense.

I appreciate the feedback, and we're still thinking about how best to do it. I'm hoping at some point twitter will implement a more granular way to ask for permissions.

As for direct messages, I believe twitter will stop asking for that either today or tomorrow.

I couldn't find a way to ask for fewer permissions. All we need is ability to post tweets since there's a checkbox to post to your followers when you ask a question or start an AMA.

We don't use any of the other permissions and won't do anything unexpected.

For what it's worth, we've run the Graffiti app on Facebook since the launch of the platform, and have never spammed anyone or their friends, or misused any data or permissions.

We ask for a relevant photo when you create an AMA. I think a photo of the person answering questions is more relevant than some sort of suicide-related stock photo.

We're planning on adding at least Facebook as a login alternative (with minimal permissions). Maybe other methods in the future as well.

I didn't see a way to do that, but if there is one I'll implement it soon.

Thanks! Would love to talk once this rush dies down a bit.

Side note: IE is 2.5% of visits. Chrome is 58%.

Yes, I wish we had already built that feature.

There's a checkbox to tweet to your followers when you post an AMA or when you ask a question.

I don't know if there's a way to request just the ability to tweet. But we don't use any of those other permissions.

Yes, AnyAsq is a YC company. We hadn't asked Harj to do an AMA though. :) And we hadn't really intended to launch quite yet but we're not complaining.

Ways we hope AnyAsq beats reddit ama:

-The concept should make more sense to people as a standalone site than as a sub-section on another site. (Easier to explain, easier to link to, etc)

-As a standalone site we can optimize the interface for this concept, which is really a very different idea than reddit.com.

-Twitter integration is really helpful. Acts as both moderation and as a way for people to spread AnyAsq to their followers when they do an AMA or ask a question.

-We're a YC company which will hopefully help us get people like Harj (or pg? Don't do it quite yet though please) on there and maybe help with press.

Apparently we accidentally launched AnyAsq!

I'm not seeing where you did that. Which AMA or question or username is it?

This is a side project that displays the 100 best, highest rated products on Amazon.com.

All of the products have close to 5 stars, and enough reviews to make the rating significant (usually over 50). Each product also has a very short summary of its Amazon reviews.

The information was gathered by manually going through hundreds of Amazon pages and filtering out all the noise and all the products with too few reviews, removing products that are too similar (no need for two sets of steak knives), and making various judgment calls like choosing a product that's 0.1 stars lower because it's $150 cheaper. Then, I read through hundreds and hundreds of Amazon reviews in order to write a short summary of why each product is awesome.

I've been running some ads on Reddit and it's gotten a great reception so far. Would love to hear what everyone here thinks.