benjamincanfly

Am I missing something, or is the outcome of every sprouts games predetermined?

> In most organizations the developers are some of the highest paid employees. They get paid well because their skills are scarce and hard to reacquire. This leads to entrenched “senior” developers who produce little, but “know” (and therefore get paid) a whole lot. It also shifts the emphasis to stability and away from being quick, nimble, and adaptive. Over time this turns your development teams into an occupying force rather than a fighting force.

When this process is unhindered a company's right brain starts to wither and die.

The initial site broke too many conventions in an attempt to differentiate. I'm now focusing on adhering to convention in areas where clarity is key. The site has a shorter name ("chchchat"), chat rooms are no longer called conversations, and users are able to give rooms custom titles in addition to tags. The "intelligent" features of the site are now dormant, and even when active will remain transparent to users.

I've removed redundant content and minimized certain features so that the interface is focused on the chat rooms themselves. I've also redesigned the chat room listings to look more like the layouts of popular media sites like YouTube. Also it's now easier to invite friends to chat rooms, as each one has a static URL which is displayed prominently for copy/pasting.

Thanks for taking another look, and thanks again for all of the feedback you shared last week!

Link directly to each site from the browse/search results page. I want the option to skip your site summary page and quickly open ten blogging sites in new tabs for comparison.

On the summary pages, I almost didn't realize there were reviews. If there are only one or two, it's not enough content for me to realize it just by looking at my scrollbar. That adwords block is going to be a wall for most people. I'd remove the screenshot altogether and put truncated reviews right next to the vital details.

Edit: There's another reason for removing the screenshot - for me, it just registers as a flash ad, and I almost don't even look at it. At http://www.wappied.com/apps/mint my brain wants to think that's a Vista ad on the right. Once you do look at it, it's still only about a quarter of its original size, so you're absorbing purely visual data(does it look cool?), which you already kind of get from the nice-sized logo.

If I understand correctly, though, you aren't doing it as a marketing ploy, you're doing it to find out for yourself just how difficult it is to manage a small company without specialized mobile applications. My guess is you'll find out that it isn't so hard, but I get what you're doing and it's kind of cool.

Edit: Actually - the site doesn't go into detail as to the nature of the app he's trying to build, but it sounds like it might be some kind of mobile staffing/placement service, i.e. something built for iPhones. If that's the case, trying to find your co-founder by using your iPhone PRE-application could possibly be used as a wacky little test case to prove the necessity of the app you're looking to build.

Originally there was no recommendation system planned, but once I realized how easy it would be I had some infatuation-based feature creep. Going back to the drawing board with 'don't tell them, show them' as priority 1.

You can post the link from your address bar, but the next step will be to make each tag and conversation a static URL which can be crawled by Google.

The theory page was basically written for the HN and reddit/r/programming audiences, because I wanted to get some serious feedback on the concept itself. In the next month or two everything will be made more palatable.

Thanks for the feedback.

I'm finding it hard to sum the site up in a phrase, but I know this is important.

>Seems very difficult to get off the ground without a large, extremely active userbase.

Yep, same old problem. I don't have a marketing budget, so I'll just have to try doing it the hard way.

>Domain name is wayyy to long..

At this point in the game it's either made-up words, non-descriptive domains, or descriptive, long domains. I like conversational speech, so I went with the third option. I think it's very easy to remember, which may offset the length. I think it's funny that we consider three words so long when it comes to the web, but I basically agree with what you're saying.

You can read my whole spiel at http://www.circleofconversation.com/#tab=theory, but basically the idea behind the app is that people like talking to strangers online(like we're doing right now) as long as there is a sufficiently precise topical specifier(like we have here). The app attempts to accomplish this by letting users give their chat rooms tags which fade out over time and then disappear if they aren't refreshed/spoken aloud. They're constantly replaced by now-accurate tags, so ideally every conversation has a very precise set of topical specifiers at all times, making them worth joining.

I'd love to get some feedback on the general concept as well as execution specifics, though the UI is rough and the feature set is basic. Thanks, HN.

P.S. I'm intentionally posting this in the evening to try to avoid any significant traffic, and to give myself time to hot-fox any glaring bugs, since I do client work during the day. I bet this sounds familiar to at least half of HN's readers.

I think it would be great if user registration happened in seasons. I.e. every three months, there's a 48-hour period during which new people can sign up. The purpose of this would be to allow the site to retain a unique personality. If you constantly add new people, it's hard to know who's who and what we're doing here. Treat it more like a large and semi-exclusive collective, and give it a chance to center itself for a while before expanding again.