4 ms·
Immediate gut reaction: I don't get it... and it's ugly. I wouldn't work on the design if I were you. Honest opinion, it'd be a bit like lipstick on a pig at t
by newobj 17y ago
Immediate gut reaction: I don't get it... and it's ugly.
I wouldn't work on the design if I were you. Honest opinion, it'd be a bit like lipstick on a pig at the moment. I think the fundamental premise is flawed - I cannot imagine in any stretch of my imagination why I or any normal person would visit this page, much less withstand the friction of the service in order to interact with it.
My elevator pitch re-imagining of what you're doing: "Quotes can serve as great summaries, excerpts, or lead-ins of a larger story. They also humanize stories or events by putting a face or voice on them. Quotestory.com brings you each day's biggest news and events one quote at a time, presented in a beautiful and simple interface that lets users get a quick read on what's happening in the world."
Essentially, the site would scrape the news to pull out candidate quotes, as well as allowing user submissions. Weighting system incorporates crowed voting as well as "page rank" of scraped quotes. The quotes are pegged to a specific point in time, and the front page displays a sort a chronological arrangement of quotes, chunked into days (maybe something hierarchical to summarize entire weeks/months in the past). You get a unique view of each's days events via direct quotes rather than editorialized headline. Quotes click through to an article. If you can extract a attribution, perhaps a small image of the quotee. If you get smart enough, perhaps you can have some sort of point-counterpoint dueling quotes to show both sides of an issue.
I'm not saying this is insanely compelling either, but I can at least see a small value add in that some people may prefer to graze on news this way.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoSo I'm going to add you in the "unsure" category. (grin) Thanks for the feedback. You made my day! I love negative feedback. So much of running a startup is getting any attention at all. If they hate you, at least they're listening. Appreciate your time, and I'll work as hard as I can on the value proposition.
- newobj 17y agoHey, I don't hate. Just trying to help! :) I deeply admire anyone trying to do their own thing.
- DanielBMarkham 17y agoAnd I appreciate it. I should have said "if you confuse them and they call your app ugly" I'm learning today that there's too much of a cognitive load in coming to the app fresh and seeing so much text from everywhere with so little context. There's too much inertia in the average reader to spend any time at all signing up. The site is ugly. People confuse the featureset with tumblr. This is all tremendously good stuff, and you can believe me that I am taking notes. You've been a great help.
- taloft 17y agoYou know what? I don't get it either and it's ugly at the moment. But, I didn't get Twitter. Hell, I still don't get Twitter. And who would've thought Facebook could ever replace MySpace? Well, ok MySpace was bad... really really bad in a neo-early 90's bad graphic designer kind of way. So maybe THAT was predictable. ;) But I think "pg" put it best when he said (paraphrasing) that: by definition, you can't really predict any new idea. Most new good ideas initially appear really bad. The point is that it's still too early to decide whether it's a pig, even if it needs lipstick.