herewego

You have a winner on your hands. License this technology because it has no place on a sub-par designed "web 2.0" business wanna-be site. Be outrageously aggressive in your attempts to contact would be licensees.

I launched socialpredictor.com a couple days ago. I got pretty good feedback, mostly good but some bad, from the people who took the time to actually use the site. I was more than pleased!

I've found that unless you have a largely technical startup, HN is probably not the best place to launch. To get feedback, it's great, but to stir up PR, not so much.

Now it's time to start the PR push and get that critical mass which I think is going to be by far the hardest part. We'll see...

A "dick wad" you are not. I'm an honesty-is-the-best-policy kind of guy too, so I'm not offended by your straightforward no-bs critique.

You've pointed out the biggest issue I'll have going forward - hitting critical mass. Most of the other commentators have suggested removing the login requirements for voting. I think it's likely that will result in more interaction from casual visitors. However, I'm not sure how much it will do for my user count - we'll see.

Thanks.

I never considered that - good idea :)

You're right, I'll get on that. Thanks.

It's funny that you mention the part where you'd like to start using the site anonymously, because that was the way I had originally planned to differentiate myself in this space.

What you're describing is what I was thinking to almost a 'T'. Have two voting ranges, one for registered users and one for anonymous users. Sounds like I need to jump back into that and start building that out as a feature.

Thanks for the comments guys, these really make a difference.

Ok, it sounds like I need to rethink the login issue.

I was thinking of adding the current results via graphs and it sounds like you think I need to communicate results in a better way as well - I'll get on that, thanks for pointing it out.

As for the money, that can come later. I'm more interested in seeing if it's a viably high-traffic site idea before I slap on the ads.

Hey guys! I finally got my site out the door tonight and thought I'd see what the HN early-adopter crowd thought of it.

The idea with SocialPredictor.com is that it's meant to be fun. There were two angles I knew I could take with a prediction site - fun or statistically valid predictions. I chose the former. Was I at least marginally successful?