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Karma Widget: Display Your YC (and other) Karma
- spage 18y agoA good example of a novel minor marketing effort for your start-up. An excellent idea. Putting together something small like the Karma Widget is an enjoyable diversion to boot. We all need those once in a while.
- jonnytran 18y agoThe real kicker here is that he's giving people incentive to group together all their profiles across the web, allowing Duck Duck Go to search people better than anyone else. That's genius!
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoThis gives me a bit too much foresight credit. Honestly, I got the idea for these widgets after seeing one too many comments like this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379936 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379936. I agree with that thread that your YC karma isn't too useful on other sites, but then I realized it would be useful to display on your own sites. So I got to building it... I quickly realized that there is karma on other sites, and it might be cool to aggregate. Then I realized I could possibly generate some new Duck Duck Go users this way. Then I realized (by someone indirectly pointing it out to me), that there are SEO implications when deploying widgets. But I didn't think (until your comment) about improving search by aggregating profile information :). Just to be clear wrt privacy, we're not currently storing any IP info or the aggregate usernames in the DB, and have no plans to do so: http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
- paul9290 18y agoSuch karma across many platforms and that is verified by trusted contacts(your friends) will prove in general to be extremely powerful for semantic/social services! For example an idea of mine is to create a Rotten Tomatoes meets Twitter. Instead of indexing/compiling trusted press/bloggers I want a web-service/site that reads, understands and compiles all the reviews on Twitter about each movie. Right now I have to search tons and tons of Twitter search pages, as opposed to a web-service doing this automatically and presenting it in a simple UI. This same idea can be applied to tons of topics..restuarants, hotels, etc, etc.... One issue with this idea is it can be gamed easily, but not if this service only reads, understands and compiles from trusted/verified sources (karma being a good way to achieve this). Might be abstract, but 1st time writing this idea/thought out!
- gleb 18y agoBeautiful link bait. Seriously, it's a really clever idea. Fortunately/unfortunately Google frowns on link bait unrelated to the core business of your site: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild http://www.seomoz.org/blog/widgetbait-gone-wild so this is definitely somewhere in the gray SEO area.
- swombat 18y agoYou know, what I would love and use right away on some of my blogs is a similar widget but that allows me to include voting badges - particularly one that uses that script that came out a while ago to detect whether the user is logged in those voting sites and displays them only if they are. That would be one heckuva handy widget!... does it exist anywhere?
- dangoldin 18y agoGreat way to get new people to go your site! It's lots of small stuff like this that gets people to go to your site. Very clever way to spread your presence to other sites!
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoYou are not your job. You are not your online profiles. You are not your YC karma. But hey, that shouldn't stop you from displaying it... Sister "Profiles" Widget: http://duckduckgo.com/profiles.html http://duckduckgo.com/profiles.html Live examples: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/ http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/
- djworth 18y agoAdded it to my new site hosted on GAE http://www.danworth.com http://www.danworth.com
- nirmal 18y agoI was just working on simple widget that showed my last few comments with links back to HN. Although I'm having mixed feelings about using it on my homepage.
- raju 18y agoMakes me think... maybe its time BackType came up with a widget... yes? Might save you the trouble. www.backtype.com Of course it won't help with your predicament, but it will be easier in case you do decide to display your HN comments.
- nirmal 18y agoBacktype is nice but it would require me to replace my profile url with one of theirs. It's really geared towards people that don't have a website of their own.
- omakase 18y agoYou don't have to replace your profile url with ours, we only suggest that for people that don't have a website. You could claim your comments: http://www.backtype.com/url/news.ycombinator.com%252fuser%3Fid%3Dnirmal http://www.backtype.com/url/news.ycombinator.com%252fuser%3F... and add them to your account and create a widget no problem.
- nirmal 18y agoCan widgets pull in the actual comments? The widget I'm looking at only has a link to the parent article. I'd actually like both.
- omakase 18y agoRight now the search widget is the only one that displays comments: http://mm.urbantwelve.com/ http://mm.urbantwelve.com/ We could do this pretty easily though.
- prakash 18y agoSmart idea!
- lazyant 18y agoIt works for me for YC but not for reddit.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoreddit username?
- epi0Bauqu 18y agolazyant, duh... reddit timed out on your initial request. Tried it again, and it worked. Maybe I can find a way to use their so-called "secret api"...
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoI found this: http://www.programmableweb.com/api/reddit http://www.programmableweb.com/api/reddit But can't find anything about getting user info. Anyone here know?
- lazyant 18y agoHi, Thanks for looking into this and good guess on the username ;-). It's still showing '0' though, in case that helps.
- Alex3917 18y agoSuggested additions: Facebook friends and feedburner subscribers.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoNoted. Thought about both, but didn't see an easy way to integrate, so put off. Anyone know of any easy way? Feedburner seems only to serve images of the #, and FB seems to require auth.
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoHere's the way for Feedburner: http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=HackerWatrCoolr http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=Hack...
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoUnfortunately, this returns 0 for most feeds right now, and is apparently a known bug: http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-for-developers/browse_thread/thread/d296004b9b019747/d88eabdd03b61f4e?lnk=gst&q=awareness#d88eabdd03b61f4e http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-for-developers/bro... I will add Feedburner when they fix this (I hope soon).
- epi0Bauqu 18y agoStriking out with FB (for w/o auth). It is supremely annoying FB doesn't include the # on their public pages, e.g. http://www.facebook.com/people/Gabriel-Weinberg/700754 http://www.facebook.com/people/Gabriel-Weinberg/700754
- felixc 18y agoIf people would just stop caring about meaningless numbers displayed next to your username, the world would be a better place. Specifically, the world of community-moderated sites wouldn't have to put up with crap submissions that exist solely to gather up-votes.
- jrockway 18y agoWhat makes you think that karma is meaningless? I find it meaningful. Sometimes I read a troll-like post, and check out the user that wrote it. If they have 3000 karma, it is likely that I am missing their point, and need to think some more. If they have -10 karma, then they are probably just a troll. I know it's "bad" to judge someone by a number... but we do it because it is usually helpful.
- felixc 18y agoWhat you describe is the intended, valid use of the metric. What I am complaining about is people who care on a personal level about what their own karma is, and who do things just to inflate that number. Facebook/Myspace "friends" whom you don't actually know? "Vote up if *" posts? Lolcat or comic or whatever posts? I know HN is (mostly) blissfully free of these things, but they are a direct consequence of the karma system.
- sh1mmer 18y agoFacebook is such a noticeable absence. It'll be nice when they are open. Not that I'm holding my breath.
- lst 18y agoAll of you high karma folks around: 'Karma' is a quite recent invention, in fact it dates only a few years back. Everything growing so fast is always exposed to dissolve in even less time...
- Raphael 18y agoAre you kidding? Brownie points are old hat.
- trezor 18y agoErr no. Slashdot had karma-points long before they shifted to simply "Good" or "Excellent" and stuff like that.
- lst 18y agoHow 'old' is internet itself? Not more than the mentioned 'few' years. Really important (and great) things grow slowly and die slowly.
- sahaj 18y agokarma, the new celebrity status symbol.