jaredbrown

Very good point. Thanks for pointing that out.

I am sure I'd have more users signed up if anyone could sign up. But I wonder about the quality of those users. Invited users feel they've earned something I hope. So they in theory should be more likely to fill out their profiles and participate in the site. Making the site invite-only also solves a lot of issues, spam links chief among those.

Currently I give all new users 3 - 5 invites each week. Though only a fraction of them are handed out.

I am a proponent of specialization. I've found it is easier to convince clients to use your services if you have a track record of developing similar projects and appear to have expert knowledge in that area.

Of course, it's also great that have breadth of knowledge so you can always say Yes to client when they ask if you can do X.

I would think about which areas that you mentioned above you are most passionate about and what skill-types your current network has and base your decision off of that.

This is a blog post discussing the pros/cons of a tagging system and how to phase it into a new web site.

I'm playing around with it right now. Great stuff.

Yea the Base 64 export is what caught my attention.

I'd be interested in discussing this more. The quick answer is that it's 1st) a way to share what you're reading 2nd) a way to find others to work with.

The CV aspect is fairly unique to this sort of site, which is why I think it gets so much attention in these discussions. But as you can see it is a smaller aspect to the site compared to posts, questions, and even profiles.

The CV feature is rooted in this desire I had to host my resume, shown in its original formatting, on a clean, uncluttered page with stats showing me how many views it gets, by whom, and from where. I can share it with a simple link to anyone interested in seeing it and actually know with some certainty if they looked at it.

Great comment. Currently the site exposes the most popular post at the moment under the section, "What's on Talentopoly" on the landing page.

The next step I planned to take was to expose the Posts tab on the landing page.

Down the road I expect to make the landing page the popular posts page and the Request Invite links would take you to what is now the landing page (the request an invite page).

That's the 3-step process for exposing the posts more and more as I currently have it planned.

Thanks! Brian Hoff did the design.

Nice job noticing that. This is a high priority on the roadmap. I have some cool compressions and reductions planned for the site's assets.

Thank you to everyone who has checked out the site. I've gotten to have some interesting discussions in this comment thread. The HackerNews community has yet again lived up to my expectations. I'll try to keep the community up to date on the progress of this startup periodically.

It's not so much about searching out the content as it is about choosing what to post. It's easy to find links today with Twitter, etc. But it's hard to predict the ones that will be popular. I rely on my Twitter favorites and several other interesting sources for links. I have definitely learned a lot and know of some great, niche ways to find high quality links now.

Good idea. I'll see what I can cook up.

I'll have to check out hackerbuddy.com, hadn't heard of that site before. I've been a big fan of Heroku so far. There's a reason why others are mimicking their hosting strategy. That said, it stinks when there's downtime or the grid slows down for whatever reason. So you are more prone to those sort of outages. But to get started, it's easy and free. I'd highly recommend it.

For those interested in keeping up with the posts on Talentopoly you can find the RSS feed at http://talentopoly.com/posts/all.rss

We just had our 700th member sign up! http://talentopoly.com/users/861

I didn't realize how well the invite-only nature of the site would lend itself to attracting an audience. The hope was to merely keep the quality high by making it invite-only, but I have found it's a great incentive to join and to even has a viral edge as people like to give out invites and say they are on Talentopoly in tweets, etc. Also, just being really involved in the site myself everyday making sure that new posts were going up and things other posted were getting commented on. Now that it's starting to take on more of a life of its own I don't have to chime in on everything on the site, though my involvement is still very high throughout the day.

I think the simple answer is that it's a community serving the needs of this vertical, which includes things like learning from what others are posting and also finding others to hire and work with. That's where the resumes and profiles come into play.

100% agree with your comments, thanks for making them - let's hope that SO doesn't do link aggregation anytime soon

Around 5% post new content daily. This number is steadily going up. But the site has only started to gain traction this month. There's a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like it's off to a good start. ;)

Forrst is great if you want to see what other designers and developers are working on. Talentopoly is great if you want to see what they're reading.

I think there's room for both as I am a Forrst member and still found myself wanting to build something like Talentopoly.

Excellent, be sure to request an invite and I'll make sure you get one.

I do have a few members who share ~5 links per day on the site including myself. In a given day the site receives ~20 new links. Most of this is just now starting to gain momentum as Feb 1st is when the site launched with a new design and a few new features.

The site has close to 100 return visitors daily and building.

Revenue is not a concern at the moment.

By the way, if you want to read the public posts you can find them at http://talentopoly.com/posts

Almost forgot to mention the most important aspect, the site is invite-only. It's read-only to the public.

I launched the site in late Oct of last year and it is growing by leaps and bounds. It's built with Ruby on Rails. My hope is to build a community around sharing links strictly related to development and design. No general tech news links or other distractions. I'd love to get some feedback on it from the HN community.

Awesome tagline

I'm not sure this is descriptive enough.

I agree, this description makes the site sound like Forrst. It doesn't highlight the focus on professionals sharing links to things that they're reading.