illdave

Thanks for the heads up - I definitely need to fix that. Thanks for the kind words, let me know how it goes :)

I'm still slowly working on Hackerbuddy: http://hackerbuddy.com/ - fun fact, the user base is now at a level where I can find people on Hackerbuddy to help improve Hackerbuddy. Is there a name for apps that recursively improve themselves?

http://hackerbuddy.com/ - One on one mentoring for coders & designers (took much longer than 10 hours, but it's free!)

I've been playing with pjax lately, and it works really well - there's a very subtle improvement with rendering pages, and it does feel faster. Looking forward to trying out Turbolinks.

Congratulations on launching! Site design is great and the service looks really useful - great job, and good luck.

This is awesome, thanks very much - BetaPunch looks incredibly useful.

Thanks very much! I completely agree with keeping the simplicity of it - I'd much rather focus on having it do one thing really, really well rather than lots of things "just ok". Really appreciate the kind words, thanks again.

This doesn't just alert you anytime someone mentions your brand (like a Google alerts style service might) - this analyses tweets to identify mentions that you might want to act on, like tech support issues, feature requests and (y favourite) when a journalist mentions you.

It assigns a sentiment score based on a large bag of words. I'm making improvements to it each day, and it's slowly getting better. Terrible at picking up sarcasm though, but I think most sentiment analysis tools are.

Aha, thanks - good catch. Fixed!

Thanks for the kind words - let me know how you get on with it (dave@recon.io)

Thanks! Yep, at the moment I've set it to only pick up English language tweets but I could potentially roll out other languages at a later date.

Thanks for the feedback and the headsup on the CSS bug, I'll get that fixed. Pagination sounds like a good idea, or reworking how it fetches the data from Twitter.

When a campaign is created it queries Twitter's API for the brand name (e.g. "Hipmunk") every 10 minutes, and then runs filters on each tweet to categorise it.

Hi HN - I've been working on a Twitter brand monitoring service that alerts you whenever anything interesting is tweeted about your brand. It analyses each tweet, so it can tell you when a user asks a question, when you get good & bad feedback and when a journalist tweets about you (amongst other things).

I'd love to hear your feedback.

Hi HN, finally launching my side project: Recon.io let's you see what people are saying about your brand on Twitter, and analyses each tweet for sentiment and can spot questions about your brand, feature requests and support issues - so instead of being pinged with every tweet that mentions you, you're only alerted when something interesting happens.

It also alerts you if any journalists tweet about you or your industry (which can be really useful if you're trying to get press coverage for your startup).

I'd love to know what you think - you can check out a demo without having to sign up here: http://recon.io/demo

Congratulations on launching. Really interesting idea with lots of potential, nice work.

Google will follow those 301s and realise that the old URLs are the same as the new URLs. From experience, you may see a slight drop in some search rankings when you make the switch as it can take Google some time to factor the 301s into it's algorithm, but remember not to panic - if you see any drops (big 'if'), it should only be temporary and I'd imagine you'd be back to normal within 2-3 weeks.

Ideally though, you'd just configure Rails to use the trailing slash instead so you didn't have to risk a temporary drop. If it's too much of an issue or would be a hassle to do though, don't worry too much - you'll be fine.

This is incredibly useful - thanks so much.

Congrats on launching - always difficult to finally get it out the door, so good job.

As adambenayoun said, using slides to present information can make it harder to get your message across (either people will miss some of the slides, or the slides will move halfway through being read - which is pretty frustrating).

I'm most likely not your target audience, but my advice would be to refine the messaging on the homepage. I couldn't figure out what it is your app actually does (could just be me skim-reading it, but keep in mind that's how a lot of people will approach your site). It talks about how important data is - but I can't tell what data I'd get back. It says "delivering quantitative information on developer trends and demographics" - what kind of information? What should I do with that?

I think one of the biggest things you need to answer on your homepage is "what problem does the app solve"? The main headline is "Stay on top of the latest programming trends" - but it doesn't tell me why I should. Think about who the app is designed for, and what they'd use it for - and that can probably help you adapt and refine your message in a way that's simpler and more targeted. Good luck!

Their privacy policy is also licensed under Creative Commons and completely free to take and adapt: http://automattic.com/privacy/ - great move from Automattic.

Thought I'd make it easy to find all of the Hackerbuddy members who are willing to help with beta testing for your projects and apps. (And as ever, all feedback is hugely appreciated).

That's great, thanks very much for the advice, those are some really good starting points for me to work from.

It's all built on Ruby on Rails, and it's running on Heroku - expect a more detailed post later on the Moki blog :)

No, that's a good point - if a lot of people would find it useful visiting those Twitter profiles (from the main company page?) that can be added. Thanks for the feedback.

Hi, it does work - it's just a brand new site that only went live today, so there are only a couple of jobs in the system at the moment.

I think I may need to reword the landing page as it might not be completely clear how the site works. You can't give job offers to people who haven't applied for a job. Now, if pg applies for a job that you've listed, you'll probably find that a lot of people on your team follow him on Twitter - so his application will appear at the top of your list - but it won't list people who haven't seen your job listing and chosen to apply.

Thanks very much - you're right, I certainly follow people who are unrelated to my industry, but it shouldn't affect the results Moki displays, as it's very unlikely that a celebrity will apply for a job on Moki, or recommend working for a specific company (and even if they do - that data is still probably useful to know).

Hi Jason, thanks very much for the feedback - I really appreciate it. It sounds like the copy is definitely something I need to get right.

And in answer to your question - It's a recruiting platform like The Resumator, or Jobvite, but with a job board built in. It also adds social data to job listings and to job applications - so each job listing will also show a list of people who recommend working there. If you're an employer, when people apply for you job, it shows you a list of your team members who choose to follow the applicant on Twitter.

Companies could find it useful because recruiting is extremely hard - there's a low signal to noise ratio, so you might get lots of job applications from people who aren't really suitable, and only a few applications from people who are great. Moki helps you spot the people who are most likely to fit in quicker. Job seekers can find it useful because jobs listed aren't from recruitment agencies - they're from the actual company themselves - you can see a profile page of the company that explains their culture, office & perks and you can see a list of people who recommend working there.

It works, hopefully, seamlessly - companies list jobs in the same way they would with a regular job board and people apply for jobs directly on Moki, filling in a form on the site. The only difference is that you need to log in through Twitter to sign up. Nothing is ever automatically tweeted from their account.

As you can see - I've not quite found a way to word the concept elegantly yet. Thanks again for the feedback - I genuinely appreciate it.

Hi HN, I finally got around to launching Moki - a recruiting platform & job board that aims to make hiring easier, by using social data. It's partly inspired by pg's request for startups that use Twitter as an infrastructure.

I'd really love to hear your feedback - criticism of the landing page, copy, design & concept is all genuinely welcome.

Just to confirm, it's working well on Chrome 20 on Mac for me (no lag, not maxing out the CPU, very smooth). It's interesting from a technical perspective, although design-wise I can't really see any practical reason to use it. Fun though.