4 ms·
Why is this interesting?
by thomasptacek 19y ago
Why is this interesting?
- irrelative 19y agoBecause it is probably the easiest site to test out that I've encountered. I've never demoed a site and had it be so easy to get up and running. It should be a model in user interface. The reason it's interesting here is that it was partially made by a well known y-combinator person (who also worked on reddit).
- thomasptacek 19y agoI'm not being clear. What does this site actually do? All I saw it do was echo the text I entered back at me, and store it the equivalent of a tinyurl.
- andreyf 19y agoIt can password protect it, and you can link things from page to page. Some of the best sites don't do anything "impressive", really...
- thomasptacek 19y agoFor example?
- nostrademons 19y agoReddit, LiveJournal, FaceBook?
- pc 19y agoYou can criticise many aspects of Facebook... but it does a lot of impressive things.
- irrelative 19y agoActually? I sort of think that facebook's impressiveness is in its ability to scale the features so nicely. I don't think there are any features on facebook that couldn't be made by your average ycombinator news reader (they might be slow as all hell, but I bet most of us could create working demos of most features).
- pc 19y agoFacebook does a lot of almost invisible but extremely smart things. Two examples: when you specify the type of relationship when adding a friend, Facebook uses the info to decide how much information to present about the person in your news feed. Or when two people list themselves as being in a relationship, Facebook will show the most recent picture of the two together (if such a picture exists, and privacy permissions permit it in your case). Nothing fancy. Just extremely well thought out.
- brett 19y agoWow. I can't remember ever seeing a negative nostrademons comment. Obviously that's not earth shattering but it is feeling like downvoting is more generally on the rise around here.
- axod 19y agoeasy to test because it doesn't do much...
- palish 19y agoNeither did the first iPod. Edit: Okay, okay, sheesh, I'm not insulting it. I meant that it had one feature, which was to play music. It did exactly what it needed to do and no more. That's all I'm saying.
- thomasptacek 19y agoYou mean besides fitting ten CD cases worth of music into something that fit in your pocket? What a silly argument.
- palish 19y agoWe're talking focus. The iPod wasn't especially innovative, but it was extremely focused on exactly one thing: playing music. And that focus was executed perfectly. Having an extremely narrow focus isn't a bad thing, so to use the statement "it doesn't do much" to suggest that Jottit a bad product seems weak.
- rms 19y agoand the iPod was the first hard drive based MP3 player to use the new 1.8" hard drive.
- thomasptacek 19y agoAll due respect to aaronsw, but, the iPod's "one feature" was EXTREMELY FUCKING IMPRESSIVE. Help me understand what's impressive about this site, other than that it still has me talking about it hours after its launch?
- palish 19y agoI said exactly one thing: Suggesting "a product has a narrow focus" == "a product is bad" is lame. I didn't compare Jottit to the iPod, I compared the number of features. There's a subtle difference. Also, sorry for the 'hominem, but it's people like you that turned Reddit into Digg. Keep your fucking language clean, your caps lock off, and your rhetorical questions to yourself, or get out. This is not Slashdot. It's really sad that you act like a total troll since you're an excellent hacker, judging by http://www.matasano.com/log/thomas-ptacek http://www.matasano.com/log/thomas-ptacek I know you have more to contribute to News.YC than your ego and your snarky remarks. Try harder.
- mojuba 19y agoIn the first place it shows how user registration should look like.
- thomasptacek 19y agoYou mean, like Mediawiki?
- mojuba 19y agoHave you tried jottit? I can't imagine anything simpler than that, I mean the registration process. Although the idea itself is probably not new.
- alaskamiller 19y agoclaims-redemption registration isn't effective for a majority of the sites. when security is a prerequisite for your application, this isn't the way to go.
- staticshock 19y agosecurity is likely not a serious prerequisite to the target demographic here
- thomasptacek 19y agoI don't get it. Can you really "win" with an application just by making registration easier? I know the "every field, half your users" rule, but... is there anything more to this application?
- Goladus 19y agoHere are my observations. It's clean A demonstration of what the site does happens in one click. The editing view is responsive and fun to play with.
- axod 19y ago
- sverrejoh 19y agoIt seems like a relaunch of Infogami.com, but with a really clever entry point. Infogami had a couple of cool ideas, like "we'll release one new feature every day" and optional commercials (support us if you want). I liked Infogami, but I stopped using it when Aaron stopped doing any development on it.
- thomasptacek 19y agoI guess I never really understood Infogami either. What's the market opportunity for Wikipedia without any of the content, controls, or attention? If it's a blogging tool, why is it better than Typepad, Blogger, or Wordpress? I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'd just really like someone to give me their take on why this is a good business idea, and how it could possibly be defensible. The "feature-a-day" thing was a clever marketing idea; it did keep me coming back. But where was it going? Where is this going?
- pretzel 19y agoIt just makes life easy to have a website without having to do anything else. It's a central place where you can put up stuff and let people see it. No hosting, no payment and its simple. It's nifty for many applications: its an open wiki for anything.
- thomasptacek 19y agoYou mean like... Writeboard? An application so simple that even 37 "We'll Charge You $100 For A Calendar Plugged Into An Address Book" Signals gives away for free? I wonder why Google doesn't have something just like this already... oh, wait, they do.
- Zak 19y agoI think Aaron's evil plot was to use machine learning to provide an automated friend-of-a-friend introduction service based on what you wrote on your infogami page. I'm pretty sure he posted about it somewhere - I remember because I had the same idea. Maybe this is a new platform for that idea.
- gojomo 19y agoOne of the lessons of the net so far is that there's always opportunity in making web authoring & self-expression easier: HTML, FrontPage, Geocities, blogs, wikis, friend-linked profile pages. Jottit looks like another point on that curve.