topcat31

As someone who likes to hack things together but is really not a great developer this is wonderful!

Would it be possible to add integration for Stamen maps?

http://maps.stamen.com/

I'd love that!

To those suggesting there are other apps that do this well, I've yet to find one that's seamless and yet to find one that's social. I think there are tools that do this well (personally I like snip on windows + imgur for a slick upload process) but the killer feature is being native and easy for your average user to use. Imho.

I guess, though with the amount of traffic the site gets it still loads super fast. Would bigger images/css really slow it down that much?

This is an interesting idea - especially the API aspect of it. Have you considered partnering with some well known players to help launch the service?

Especially given the negative experiences people have with Groupon I think some social proof to show people the positive experience would be useful.

I'm not sold on the name either - 72hdeals? Are all deals 72hours long? I'm not sure I get it.

Good design.

Overall I think this could be a very exciting idea and potentially disruptive!

This is definitely on the roadmap, this initial implementation is just the bare bones.

One unusual thing with SEOmoz is that they get a huge volume of traffic through their blog where the conversion rate (to money) is low. What I'd love to see more is softer conversions such as social interactions, registered users etc.

Thanks for your feedback!

Disclaimer: I helped implement this.

I think it's a great idea. Many news sites have been displaying "visits" or "hits" next to their news stories for a while but it's never exactly clear where this comes from and how it's measured.

By pulling this data directly from Google Analytics we are speaking the same language as everyone else and displaying metrics like time on page, bounce rate etc I think reveals a greater level of data than most.

We're following in the (awesome) footsteps of people like Fred Wilson (http://chartbeat.com/demo/) and I hope that by displaying this data it will help our community keep us heading in the right direction and of course it should motivate all of us to keep pushing the numbers in the right direction :)

I'm not sure if it's the norm but I know SEOmoz are desperate for top talent and are willing to pay for it. Their web-index is pretty complex and so the engineers they hire need to be highly skilled.

Seattle, WA - SEOmoz are hiring 8 positions right now http://www.seomoz.org/blog/8-open-positions-at-seomoz

Recently named top 10 places to work in Seattle, we're hiring both engineers and online marketing people. We have jobs to fit everyone! :)

Especially if used in conjunction with a text-extraction API such as Alchemy: http://www.alchemyapi.com/api/text/

That way you only get the text of the page, stored in a cache.

Thanks for posting - this post was inspired by this Hacker News comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347428

No problems - glad you like it :)

One really annoying thing to note is that Google Docs doesn't play nicely when calling YQL and Yahoo Pipes. I'm not sure if it's Google or Yahoo screwing things up but it's annoying as hell because a combination of the two would be very powerful

An RSS feed is definitely on my todo list! Unfortunately making playlists isn't possible in the metadata API (and you can't use the full libspotify api on appengine) so that's not going to happen for a while I think...

I wish playlist stuff was in the metadata api - I'd love to write the same app but for playlists instead of albums. I can get the data but can't decode the playlist to figure out who created it and what's in it etc

This is done just for the love! :)

Hey, this is my latest project. Hope you like it. A few details for the hackers:

Built on:

- Google appengine

- Pyhton

APIs used:

- Topsy api (http://corp.topsy.com/developers/api/)

- Spotify metadata api (http://developer.spotify.com/en/metadata-api/overview/)

- Last.fm api (http://www.last.fm/api)

- Amazon api (https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/advertising/api/deta...)

First, I pull the top shared links on spotify from the Topsy api which is dead easy, then process each spotify link with the spotify metadata api to get artist/album.

Unfortunately, the metadata api from spotify doesn't give you the artwork so I head over to last.fm and amazon to see if I can get the artwork. Between last.fm and amazon I'm getting 90% of the album art which is nice.

Any Q's - hit me up on twitter: @tomcritchlow or ask a question below.

I'm not familiar with powerpivot - is that a new feature in Excel2010? Have a good link to share?

There are lots of very interesting things in this post - one of the most interesting long term changes I see is that Google are now admitting that you can lobby for algorithm changes.

I can imagine in another 12 months there will be vocal lobby groups to get Google to change parts of their algorithm for certain types of sites. This feels like the start of Google coming out of their shell and admitting that they listen to communities like HN and will respond with large scale algorithm updates.

I'd also dearly dearly love to know what this breakthrough was:

"Amit Singhal: Well, we named it internally after an engineer, and his name is Panda. So internally we called a big Panda. He was one of the key guys. He basically came up with the breakthrough a few months back that made it possible."

I don't think the plugin works via cookies though does it? Might be wrong....

A few thoughts and requests:

1) I'd love to use this tool but because of my job still need to look at the "official" search results from time to time. Is it possible to allow &pws=0 override the blocked sites so &pws=0 both session-based and browser based personalisation?

2) There's a lot of talk among startups about ignoring what users want because they don't know best. I worry that this move from Google might actually be detrimental to user experience. If you end up blocking a bunch of thin sites then the chances are high that you're not going to get better results for your search query, you'll just get fewer results (since usually Google only returns these thin sites when there's little else to offer). Also - as users get trigger happy and block a bunch of sites they may well be harming their own search experience. I'd love to hear your thoughts on how Google can mitigate against this? Especially when this rolls out to your average user rather than just the tech-savvy HN crowd.

Tom

This is a phenomenal post. I completely agree that it improves things - we recently got a massive TV in the office at Distilled to show off some key metrics using Geckoboard: http://yfrog.com/h3uhzrj

For music last.fm does a wonderful "gigs in your city" RSS feed.

Feels like trunk.ly has the data to be able to do this...

I don't know much about recommendation engines but seems fairly easy to be able to see what links I share, see similar users and then recommend me things I might have missed.

I visited the Zappos office while I was in Las Vegas recently (proof: http://dis.tl/haPmaA) and must attest to how unbelievably amazing and awesome their offices are. The culture and morale is simply breathtaking.

That said, I think that it's tied much more closely to the culture than to just the nik-naks that litter the office (though clearly they are a part of it).

I like this post and it's good to get a look at the two offices but it would be great to get more of an understanding of HOW the office environment affects the office culture.

Awesome! Let's get in touch, I love playing squash too :)

I love this site - as a recent coding n00b (see http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001) having mentors around is invaluable. Whether it's just offering advice or actually helping you write some jquery having someone to bounce ideas off is essential. I really hope this gains critical mass so that everyone uses it and it becomes a hub for finding casual mentors.

I love the concept for this, finding friendly hackers to help you on your hack project is massively useful

Thanks for sharing the video Matt - I wrote a summary of my thoughts from an SEO perspective here:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/summary-of-the-futuresearch-talk-...

I was fascinated by Bing's hints that an author's authority might not be tied to a specific domain. Don't suppose there's any chance you could share Google's thoughts on this Matt?

I completely disagree with both the premise and conclusion of this blog post.

I'm a complete coding noob (http://www.7bks.com/blog/179001) and along the way to learning programming have relied on StackOverflow for about 10 questions.

For every single one I have received complete, thorough, helpful and patient answers. In short, I could not be happier with SO. As a beginner it's been a phenomenal resource both for searching and for answering specific issues.

The post makes the point that newbies can't answer questions - and for me this is one of the reasons the quality of the site is so high. If you let anyone answer then you don't know how good quality the response is. As a beginner how am I to know if a given answer is correct?

Of course, any community site still has problems like this and SO is not immune to it but IMHO this is one of the ways they keep the quality bar higher than any other Q&A platform out there.

Google gathers lots of user data on 3rd party websites via services such as (to name a few): - Google analytics (opted in for data sharing) - Chrome - Google toolbar

@Matt Cutts - I'd love it if you could confirm exactly which user data you DO and DO NOT use to influence rankings. Or, at the very least say on record that you don't do what Bing are doing and use data from bing.com

Overall, I'm not surprised that Bing are doing this for some keywords - all the major search engines use a massive number of different signals. I'll be more surprised if it turns out this is happening at a large scale or for competitive terms.

I also work at Distilled (I'm also the guy behind 7bks.com in my spare time) and can vouch that we are the good kind of SEO :)

I'd love to work with more HN people! Come apply if you're in London or Seattle.

The answer to this is quite simple:

Revenue ~ $100 so far but I've barely had any real lists added (plenty of geeks have added lists saying "testing" etc etc). Now that V2 is live I'm going to put a lot of work into building a solid community around the site.

Upkeep - $0 - it's hosted on appengine which is free :)

In the long run I'm hoping to get some pocket money from affiliate links but at the moment I'm concentrating on building something that people want so I can build a community.

Using the similarity API is on my radar, I nearly included it in V2 but in the end decided it would be better to just stick to the core stuff and ship that. Any ideas on what would make a recommendation engine awesome are always welcome! tom@7bks.com

Thanks