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Hi Hacker News, Always been a lurker, love what I learn on here. Would appreciate your thoughts (good, bad, ugly) on a startup I've been working on. The compan

Hi Hacker News, Always been a lurker, love what I learn on here. Would appreciate your thoughts (good, bad, ugly) on a startup I've been working on. The company is BuzzLabs, a six-person Seattle startup. We've received strategic seed funding from a large player in the local business space. The goal is to save business owners (think restaurants, hotels, spas) the hassle of checking dozens of sites to find out what people are saying about them online. They want to focus on improving their business instead of surfing the web and figuring out what's relevant and interesting to their business. Our technology aggregates social media activity for a local business (i.e. reviews, tweets, blog posts, etc.) into one place, and supplements that activity with deeper analysis and trends. Behind the scenes, we're doing relevance filtering, scoring, classification, and natural language processing to make the report relevant and meaningful. We've built two separate products on the same technology platform: Find My Buzz (http://www.findmybuzz.com http://www.findmybuzz.com), and an interactive dashboard (http://www.buzzlabs.com http://www.buzzlabs.com). Find My Buzz is intended to be a lightweight, stop-and-go version of the dashboard -- simple, less-frequent printed consumption by small business owners. The dashboard is for larger businesses/chains with lots of online activity, where daily, aggregate "real-time" brand monitoring is crucial. Any feedback would be appreciated. I can also be reached at [jason at buzzlabs dot com] Thanks in advance, Jason Tan, CTO

komlenic 16y ago
Looks interesting, trying it out now (waiting for the report). Just some quick thoughts: On the "please enjoy our animated story of social media love" page, the animation is choppy and rather hard to follow... I lost interest in it very quickly. More to the point: it's not exactly clear that the user can navigate away from this page (the animation may imply to some users that something is still happening). The flow feels interrupted at this point and it seems you might better direct/capture the user to do/read something else. I'm not sure what that step might be, but it feels like a missed opportunity (for you).
- jasontan 16y ago
  Thanks for trying it out. Can you clarify on the choppy animation -- was it slow to load, or the animation speed itself wasn't smooth? Great point on sending the user on to something else.
  - komlenic 16y ago
    Sure: the animation speed itself wasn't very smooth... probably more of an opinion, but the feeling was like "yeah yeah, this is going to require too much effort to watch/grok". It was a tl;dr moment, right when you had me ripe to learn more or be directed elsewhere. And the circular tick marks above the house just scream "something's loading" as they are just too similar visually to every throbber/ajax wait symbol users are used to seeing. Hope that helps!
bitsm 16y ago
Have you checked out Postling? Sounds like they're a competitor. Great start -- small biz definitely needs good tools like these.
- jasontan 16y ago
  haha, we actually met Postling's CEO at an event in LA. I believe that we're complementary services -- they're more focused on the "publishing" whereas we're focused on the "listening".

komlenic 16y ago

Looks interesting, trying it out now (waiting for the report). Just some quick thoughts: On the "please enjoy our animated story of social media love" page, the animation is choppy and rather hard to follow... I lost interest in it very quickly. More to the point: it's not exactly clear that the user can navigate away from this page (the animation may imply to some users that something is still happening). The flow feels interrupted at this point and it seems you might better direct/capture the user to do/read something else. I'm not sure what that step might be, but it feels like a missed opportunity (for you).

jasontan 16y ago
Thanks for trying it out. Can you clarify on the choppy animation -- was it slow to load, or the animation speed itself wasn't smooth? Great point on sending the user on to something else.
- komlenic 16y ago
  Sure: the animation speed itself wasn't very smooth... probably more of an opinion, but the feeling was like "yeah yeah, this is going to require too much effort to watch/grok". It was a tl;dr moment, right when you had me ripe to learn more or be directed elsewhere. And the circular tick marks above the house just scream "something's loading" as they are just too similar visually to every throbber/ajax wait symbol users are used to seeing. Hope that helps!

bitsm 16y ago

Have you checked out Postling? Sounds like they're a competitor. Great start -- small biz definitely needs good tools like these.

jasontan 16y ago
haha, we actually met Postling's CEO at an event in LA. I believe that we're complementary services -- they're more focused on the "publishing" whereas we're focused on the "listening".