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Tell HN: We have had our 100 thousandth bookmark and wanted to tell you about it
We created an online bookmarking site over a year ago - favilous.com. We had never released a website before and after 4 months of hard graft we released to the world!
We posted on HN to begin with and got a mixed response, however we got some great comments on how we could improve the site. Whilst this was going on a few blogs covered us - Venturebeat, Killerstartups, thenextweb and we began to slowly grow traffic.
What was exciting for us was that people from all corners of the Earth were using the site! To us novices this was really cool!
Whilst this was going on we posted more and more articles on HN to try and find out what people wanted from bookmarking. We emailed our userbase to try and find out what they liked and more importantly what they didn't like about our (their) site. We then collated all this info and set about improving the site. Given that we launched on HN, we wanted to share with you what Favilous looks like now.
We have:
Added an import facility from Delicious
Amended the community page and done it in such a way that we can now keep on top of spam.
Completely overhauled the homepage so as more people understand the site and sign up and share useful sites with you.
Stripped back some of the functionality as some felt it was too complicated - therefore menu's are cleaner, options are simpler and instructions are better explained. We hope it is now a more straightforward bookmarking tool.
Added a tag based view so that users who are more familiar to Delicious will now be able to use Favilous in a Delicious type way.
Sharpened up the panels and uploaded more background images for you to choose from.
Given users the option to choose a different theme this means you do not have to have a background image at all and this improves performance significantly.
In the interests of building a sustainable product, we are currently finalising a list of paid features which we believe our community will value. Having conducted our own research we will be looking to implement Bookmarking of RSS Feeds, Archiving and Search of web content, plus some features which are unique to us. You guys helped us get to this position and so we come to you again - what you would most like to see from Favilous (or just a bookmarking site in general).
Thanks for all the help in getting us this far!
Steve
- sw007 16y agoClickable: http://www.favilous.com http://www.favilous.com
- vtail 16y agoSo... why would I want to use your site instead of using delicious? Also, "It's free... for now! Users signing up from February 2011 onwards will be required to pay a small fee." - in contrast with "Bookmark for Free" in the features.
- cosgroveb 16y agoWhy? Because Yahoo has indicated that they will shut down delicious sometime in the near future...
- vtail 16y agoUps... I somehow missed that part!
- sw007 16y agoThat is a mistake on our part! We were thinking of charging and when we made the changes we planned on charging. Since then we have had a change of heart but have obviously forgotten to change that text - we will do that tonight! With regard to the Delicious question - we get that a lot. Yahoo could be shutting Delicious down, which would be a bonus! But the best explanation I can give is if you are a visual person, like things laid out in a nice way and you also want to know what your friends are bookmarking then we are a good fit. We offer Twitter like functionality whereby you can follow people - and then therefore see what they are bookmarking. If PG signed up to Favilous, you could follow him and see what sites and articles he bookmarks - we think this is a cool feature which Delicious do not offer.
- DeusExMachina 16y agoSo, since you say you decided to change your monetization strategy, what will it be?
- sw007 16y agoWe have had some interest from businesses and academic organisations - they want their own bespoke version of Favilous. So currently we are working on this so that we give these organisations the ability to have their own bespoke version of Favilous - for a fee.
- u48998 16y agoNot going to trust no website for my bookmarks, thank you: Import/Download your Delicious Bookmarks to Firefox 4 without loosing Tags using Slurp Add-on, http://wp.me/pkvq6-w4 http://wp.me/pkvq6-w4
- u48998 16y agoMan I hate it when people downvote my comment instead of replying. What an affed up system this is here at HN.
- haploid 16y agoYou are probably being downvoted because your comment is 94% spam, and because "loosing" is not a word that makes any sense in the context of your post.
- u48998 16y agoCan you show me spam in my comment? And where did I use the word "loosing"?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- shadowpwner 16y ago> Firefox 4 without loosing Tags It's right there. Also most people look down on url shortners, because it's a great way to hide spam.
- u48998 16y agoI corrected the URL, Wordpress.com as you know has really long URLs so I didn't want to post the whole thing. I am not sure if I am following how Firefox 4 and no tags is a spam?
- tsigo 16y agoSo after reading this I signed up. First thing I did was add the bookmarklets to my Chrome Bookmarks Bar, went to something I wanted to Bookmark, hit the bookmarklet and... nothing. Chrome blocked the pop-up. And to show it I have to enable pop-ups on a per-site basis for anything I want to bookmark. Not happening. So... yeah. So much for that.