5 ms·

Trunk.ly Keeps Track of the Links You Share Online

36 points by robryan 16y ago

alexdong 16y ago
Thanks folks. Trunk.ly was launched 33 days ago right here on HN. Here is the original link when we announced that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 There are still tons of works need to be done. Our viral co-efficient is too low, new user orientation process is horribly missing. But it's been a great ride so far. we're currently seeking angel investment - if you like what we've achieved so far and are interested in finding out more, then contact us at tim@trunk.ly and we'd love to share our plans and goals and see if we can work together.
- nc17 16y ago
  One problem is that you log in and you have nothing to look at. You really want to have something for new users to get a great "out of the box" experience and they'll be more motivated to come back.
  - tbull007 16y ago
    Totally agree - we're rethinking that first experience at the moment so that you go through a more guided process. The intent is to send you to connect your social networks, then fill out your profile, then send you to the home screen. With a priority queue for new users, we should be able to get you to a home page that is full of your links by the time you first see it.
    - bootload 16y ago
      On a lot of services you are automatically followed by the founders, like greeters at the door of a party. One idea could be to either seed some initial links (via suggested users) or add some top links (links with high frequency) from either yourself or Alex.
      - tbull007 16y ago
        We threw the greeters idea away mostly because we selfishly want to choose who we follow on Trunk.ly because we find it really useful. If we follow everyone we'd have to have some other account that we 'really' use. Seeding the links is a good idea - maybe we'll make new users automatically follow us which would achieve that goal and means they have some links in their Timeline.
        bootload 16y ago
        "... If we follow everyone we'd have to have some other account that we 'really' use. ..." Yeah, good point.
        dauphin 16y ago
        That's the trick in these kind of discussion: the eternal come back.
- akkartik 16y ago
  I love the data export/aggregation.
mattdeboard 16y ago
I am glad to see Trunk.ly get this kind of attention. I contacted Alex and Tim last month to see if there was anything that I as a novice programmer could do to help them with their suddenly overwhelming workload. I was seeking just a little bit of work as a learning exercise, and these guys asked me to write an RSS connector for them. It was the most effective learning experience I've had, ever. I am very happy for these guys. Two class acts who gave me the chance to actually get some code put into production. (AFAIK they're still using the RSS connector I wrote, with some adaptations and what have you I didn't know to include.) Kudos, guys.
- tbull007 16y ago
  Hey Matt, thanks for the kind words. We really appreciated the work you did, and yes, that RSS connector is still there.
StavrosK 16y ago
How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask?
- bootload 16y ago
  "... How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask? ..." Probably by making a product that people want and maybe a good bit of timing. If you read through the first post by Alex ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 you'll see a mention of Yahoo refuting a claim they are closing delicious, but instead making it know the wish to sell. When launching a new service with a big existing competitor, uncertainty can be used to boost user interest in alternatives.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    historious has been running for more than six months now and it hasn't been mentioned in the NYT... Not only that, trunkly does basically exactly what historious does.
    - tbull007 16y ago
      I don't know the Historious team at all, so I can only comment on what I see. I saw Pinboard, Diigo, Evernote and Licorize working to take advantage of this (like getting mentions, actively posting on blogs, answering questions in Quora - all the things we've been doing) but never really saw Historious doing the same. The other thing (yes I'm biased) is that I think Historious isn't the same as Trunk.ly - Historious is a Delicious replacement service that builds these features on. The attraction to users is that it's Delicious plus. What we're trying to do with Trunk.ly is rethink how the whole bookmarking experience should work. So yes, we took advantage of the cut through we could achieve by positioning against Delicious, but in reality our market is not frustrated delicious users (which is kind of where I think Historious is placed). There's been very deliberate design decisions to resist at the moment some things that Delicious users think are critical. We're trying to bring bookmarking back to the mainstream audience who left Delicious behind a long time ago and moved on to social sharing in Twitter, Facebook and others. While functionally there are similarities (how many ways can you bookmark a link), from a positioning and direction point of view we believe we are different and have a different vision. From a coverage perspective we have a simpler positioning and broader "mass" appeal, which is likely to be more attractive to a larger blog property. Here's an example of what our press release says "Trunk.ly is a service that hooks into your online social networks, collects all the links you share then builds a personal search engine of the web page those links point to." Not once in there do we actually describe ourselves as a "bookmarking" service, although that does get written about us by others. So it could also be a bit of differentiation.
tomsuchy 16y ago
Excellent app, imported my delicious bookmarks, set up twitter/fb feeds, works like a dream. The only thing that would make the experience complete would be tag suggestions based on previously entered tags in the bookmarklet popup (you know, type a few letters, get a list of tags). Or maybe a list of all tags, I don't know, a simple alpha-sorted block of tags. Even if you don't do any of those, I would still use it though :) Great stuff! -Tom
- tbull007 16y ago
  Thanks Tom, there's a lot of work still to go - we'll make sure these things are on the list.
cj 16y ago
If anyone is looking for a simpler bookmarking app, I made http://saaave.com/ http://saaave.com/ last weekend. Bookmarks are added with a one-click bookmarklet that saves your current URL. No tagging or further action necessary. The app indexes the content of your bookmarks for fulltext searching. It's lacking a UI, but feel free to give it a try :)
- pacifika 16y ago
  Great. doesn't even need much UI. Not sure how you will scale indexing with more users - so if I could install it on my own server and and you add addons/plugins (get 1 free with every account) as extra payable features (imports etc) while keeping this bare bones install free then that would work for me.
didip 16y ago
I just registered, that's a clever way of collecting user links, through scraping status update. It seems like the bookmarking scene is getting crowded again. PS: I run a dead simple bookmarking app too - http://mybucket.co http://mybucket.co
gnubardt 16y ago
This is great! Is an HN importer coming :)
- tbull007 16y ago
  We were actually going to launch with HN importer but didn't quite get there. If we find some time, it would be a bit of fun to implement.

36 points by robryan 16y ago

Thanks folks. Trunk.ly was launched 33 days ago right here on HN. Here is the original link when we announced that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 There are still tons of works need to be done. Our viral co-efficient is too low, new user orientation process is horribly missing. But it's been a great ride so far. we're currently seeking angel investment - if you like what we've achieved so far and are interested in finding out more, then contact us at tim@trunk.ly and we'd love to share our plans and goals and see if we can work together.

nc17 16y ago
One problem is that you log in and you have nothing to look at. You really want to have something for new users to get a great "out of the box" experience and they'll be more motivated to come back.
- tbull007 16y ago
  Totally agree - we're rethinking that first experience at the moment so that you go through a more guided process. The intent is to send you to connect your social networks, then fill out your profile, then send you to the home screen. With a priority queue for new users, we should be able to get you to a home page that is full of your links by the time you first see it.
  - bootload 16y ago
    On a lot of services you are automatically followed by the founders, like greeters at the door of a party. One idea could be to either seed some initial links (via suggested users) or add some top links (links with high frequency) from either yourself or Alex.
    - tbull007 16y ago
      We threw the greeters idea away mostly because we selfishly want to choose who we follow on Trunk.ly because we find it really useful. If we follow everyone we'd have to have some other account that we 'really' use. Seeding the links is a good idea - maybe we'll make new users automatically follow us which would achieve that goal and means they have some links in their Timeline.
      - bootload 16y ago
        "... If we follow everyone we'd have to have some other account that we 'really' use. ..." Yeah, good point.
        dauphin 16y ago
        That's the trick in these kind of discussion: the eternal come back.
akkartik 16y ago
I love the data export/aggregation.

mattdeboard 16y ago

I am glad to see Trunk.ly get this kind of attention. I contacted Alex and Tim last month to see if there was anything that I as a novice programmer could do to help them with their suddenly overwhelming workload. I was seeking just a little bit of work as a learning exercise, and these guys asked me to write an RSS connector for them. It was the most effective learning experience I've had, ever. I am very happy for these guys. Two class acts who gave me the chance to actually get some code put into production. (AFAIK they're still using the RSS connector I wrote, with some adaptations and what have you I didn't know to include.) Kudos, guys.

tbull007 16y ago
Hey Matt, thanks for the kind words. We really appreciated the work you did, and yes, that RSS connector is still there.

StavrosK 16y ago

How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask?

bootload 16y ago
"... How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask? ..." Probably by making a product that people want and maybe a good bit of timing. If you read through the first post by Alex ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567 you'll see a mention of Yahoo refuting a claim they are closing delicious, but instead making it know the wish to sell. When launching a new service with a big existing competitor, uncertainty can be used to boost user interest in alternatives.
- StavrosK 16y ago
  historious has been running for more than six months now and it hasn't been mentioned in the NYT... Not only that, trunkly does basically exactly what historious does.
  - tbull007 16y ago
    I don't know the Historious team at all, so I can only comment on what I see. I saw Pinboard, Diigo, Evernote and Licorize working to take advantage of this (like getting mentions, actively posting on blogs, answering questions in Quora - all the things we've been doing) but never really saw Historious doing the same. The other thing (yes I'm biased) is that I think Historious isn't the same as Trunk.ly - Historious is a Delicious replacement service that builds these features on. The attraction to users is that it's Delicious plus. What we're trying to do with Trunk.ly is rethink how the whole bookmarking experience should work. So yes, we took advantage of the cut through we could achieve by positioning against Delicious, but in reality our market is not frustrated delicious users (which is kind of where I think Historious is placed). There's been very deliberate design decisions to resist at the moment some things that Delicious users think are critical. We're trying to bring bookmarking back to the mainstream audience who left Delicious behind a long time ago and moved on to social sharing in Twitter, Facebook and others. While functionally there are similarities (how many ways can you bookmark a link), from a positioning and direction point of view we believe we are different and have a different vision. From a coverage perspective we have a simpler positioning and broader "mass" appeal, which is likely to be more attractive to a larger blog property. Here's an example of what our press release says "Trunk.ly is a service that hooks into your online social networks, collects all the links you share then builds a personal search engine of the web page those links point to." Not once in there do we actually describe ourselves as a "bookmarking" service, although that does get written about us by others. So it could also be a bit of differentiation.

tomsuchy 16y ago

Excellent app, imported my delicious bookmarks, set up twitter/fb feeds, works like a dream. The only thing that would make the experience complete would be tag suggestions based on previously entered tags in the bookmarklet popup (you know, type a few letters, get a list of tags). Or maybe a list of all tags, I don't know, a simple alpha-sorted block of tags. Even if you don't do any of those, I would still use it though :) Great stuff! -Tom

tbull007 16y ago
Thanks Tom, there's a lot of work still to go - we'll make sure these things are on the list.

cj 16y ago

If anyone is looking for a simpler bookmarking app, I made http://saaave.com/ http://saaave.com/ last weekend. Bookmarks are added with a one-click bookmarklet that saves your current URL. No tagging or further action necessary. The app indexes the content of your bookmarks for fulltext searching. It's lacking a UI, but feel free to give it a try :)

pacifika 16y ago
Great. doesn't even need much UI. Not sure how you will scale indexing with more users - so if I could install it on my own server and and you add addons/plugins (get 1 free with every account) as extra payable features (imports etc) while keeping this bare bones install free then that would work for me.

didip 16y ago

I just registered, that's a clever way of collecting user links, through scraping status update. It seems like the bookmarking scene is getting crowded again. PS: I run a dead simple bookmarking app too - http://mybucket.co http://mybucket.co

gnubardt 16y ago

This is great! Is an HN importer coming :)

tbull007 16y ago
We were actually going to launch with HN importer but didn't quite get there. If we find some time, it would be a bit of fun to implement.