whyleym

Very interesting.

The concern I could see with this would be that you raise your price for a few days - you get a few takers but not as many as you hoped, so you lower the price back down to the original levels. I'd be a little concerned that those who subscribed at the higher levels would not be happy paying a higher recurring monthly fee when they could now subscribe to the product at a cheaper rate.

Would you / did you just manage those users back down to the original payment levels for the future months payments ? Or leave them at the higher payment levels and manage on an adhoc basis should they raise issue with pricing levels.

Thanks for taking time out to comment.

As you say Unscatter seems a similar idea and we can see where you're coming from re: context.

We hear you on the speed - this is what we are trying to focus on - make this a super quick, great user experience. You're right in that caching is the way to go - again it's one of those release early and iterate items. We don't presently do any caching as such so this is no doubt something we will iterate on.

In terms of monetisation - for the first few months we are looking at adsense to get a feel for how contextual the ads are and what the relative click through rates will be. After this we have some ideas that we hope will work out well.

Yep - we agree - we'll have a look into this

Thanks - we'll take a look into that

It's funny you should say that - this is a feature that is high on the to be developed list. We are trying to take the release, iterate often approach - so hopefully this feature will be in soon. Thanks for the comment - any other suggestions ?

It is our intention to be an all-in-one social media search. If 'social search' does not portray this have you any thoughts on what a good tagline would be to meet our aim - any suggestions more than welcome. Thanks

Presently we are using the various API's that are available for each of the services that we are linking into. We have some custom code which interogates this data and renders it to the user. In respect of historic searches and storing of the data, storing data is not something we are doing from day 1, however this is something we are certainly looking longer term. In terms of historic searches - again day 1, we search back as long as the various API's allow.

Sentiment Analysis is something we looked at, however at the moment we wanted to keep things stripped back - that's not to say we may not offer this in future as an advanced search feature or even a feature that users can turn on/off.

API's are on the agenda and these are actively being developed to allow others to call into the service. In terms of monetisation we are starting out with a contextual ad model (using Google Adsense to start) - which obviously hasn't worked out too bad for Google, however longer term we have some other ideas around this.

Thanks for taking time out to comment.

Collecta albeit a good service we felt was a little cluttered and on occasion a little sluggish - our service's aim is to be decluttered, simple, fast social search. With regards OneRiot - they are more of a full featured offering where we intend to focus more on the core search function presented back to users in an uncluttered easy to read manner.

Our aim was to provide something that was uncluttered, simple and fast which (eventually) covers as many social network and real people's views of either what people are saying about your brand or whatever you wish to search on in realtime.

We ourselves use this daily as a tool to track what people are saying about our other web properties.

Hacker News is my favourite site on the internet and having been a member for almost 4 years I've learnt a lot from everyone here. My co-founders and I couldn't think of a better place to launch our new site and get valuable feedback from a group of people we respect.

48ers allows realtime searching of a number of social networks - we created the site to scratch our own itch - to track what people are saying about other websites we own. We hope it might be useful for brands too.

Feel free to give it a go at http://www.48ers.com or jump straight into a search:

http://48ers.com/search/?q=hacker+news

http://48ers.com/search/?q=airbnb

http://48ers.com/search/?q=balsamiq

http://48ers.com/search/?q=mark+zuckerberg

Please comment here and tell us about:

* What you like

* What you dislike

* Any bugs you find

* Where you'd like to see this go in future (we have some ideas but would love to hear yours)

Looks like Google announced this yesterday - http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-...

Also with link to more detailed analysis from VideoNuze - http://www.videonuze.com/blogs/?2010-03-24/Here-s-How-Google...

Excellent - thanks for the update.

Looks like pre-ordering starts March 12 - http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ipad-available-in-us...

My bad that it's already submitted, but ...

Come on, it's Friday, it may not be completely on topic but it certainly adds a lighter note to proceedings. I love Hacker News, have learnt a heck of a lot from it and visit on a daily basis and have done for around 3 years - but is this not a little petty ?!

Anyway - to be fair to the deer it's not so much cute as dead !

Good post - an additional feature you could consider incorporating within your application is, adding something to your application which helps to 'spread the word' - such as (opted in) automated tweets (see tinychat - http://search.twitter.com/search?q=tinychat) or sharing widget (such as plaxo - http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget) where you can share with friends email addresses. You could also add the ability to share the link or your application/product through Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Delicious, Stumbleupon (which you now see on most blog posts).

I agree that there's little content here - but the key thing for me was that there is no signup process. I think the biggest single roadblock to a lot of startups is introducing a signup screen before they can start using the product.

Obviously some startups have to have a signup screen by the nature of what they do but a large number don't need one. If you're product is good enough then people will use it, hell even if it isn't good enough then people will still use it but never again. As soon as you put a signup screen in front of people using the product they will likely not signup and therefore not use the product.

What about if what you were providing was great, unique content that wasn't all about making a sale but actually giving something of purpose in a non-corporate, more personal manner ?

Yep - good point.

I think in a roundabout way what I want to say is that I wonder if you should give your company blog (to market your product) a more personal feel would this generate more custom ?

For me there's a big area around corporate blogs vs personal blogs. With our startup we've always erred on the side of corporate, keep it very much about releases and other important pieces of information we feel our users need to know about our product.

Recently we've wondered whether our next startup should have a much more personal feel - much the same way that say Peldi over at Balsamiq has developed his product and blog (http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/) and in a similar way to what Joel has as well. Peldi in particular has been completely transparent with his numbers and you do feel a genuine personal connection with him when you read his blog - I think this has helped him to connect with his audience (as with Joel) and you can relate to them both much more in a personal capacity.

For me I think it's important to have a blog (even just a coporate blog) - but I do wonder whether you can gain more traction by adding a personal touch to it.

Not sure what other YC'ers think ?