5 ms·

Show HN: TOP.ST – Get the news before it starts trending

38 points by vadimbaryshev 11y ago

vadimbaryshev 11y ago
Hello HN, I created trending news aggregation service called TOP.ST. Ratings are based on people's social network activity and updates in real-time. At the moment the service works in 29 countries. More countries are coming in future. In next updates I planning to add news categories and thinking about e-mail digest. I'm looking for a feedback. Feel free to ask me any questions here or by e-mail: mail@top.st
- blfr 11y ago
  It looks good and seems to capture the vibe of the moment well. Any details on how it works? Which networks do you monitor? Is it just Twitter? How do you know where people are from? Do you go by language? Only take into account tweets with geo information?
  - eugeneross 11y ago
    Yes! I too would love to know how it works under the hood!
    - wordlink 11y ago
      Checkout buzzsumo.com and a free version that we built wordlink.com. It gathers all the news in the world (mostly) then sorts it by its aggregated social activity. Likes shares comments tweets pins upvotes, on facebook twitter linkedin google plus reddit pinterest etc... It's also a search engine used by marketing companies to analyze the news. Scrapy twisted python crawlers and elasticsearch backend for indexing.
      - wordlink 11y ago
        Example links: http://wordlink.com http://wordlink.com http://wordlink.com/video http://wordlink.com/video http://wordlink.com/barack+obama http://wordlink.com/barack+obama http://wordlink.com/nytimes.com http://wordlink.com/nytimes.com
  - vadimbaryshev 11y ago
    I monitoring 7 networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn for the World and VK, Odnoklassniki for Russia. GEO targeting by source popularity in country.
  - mmahemoff 11y ago
    Not OP but I'll hazard a guess it looks for URLs which appear at an accelerating rate on Twitter, using a whitelist of domain sources (since we see several frequent domains). One feedback is I'd avoid the animation effect until the user has been idle for a few seconds.
    - vadimbaryshev 11y ago
      Excellent idea about waiting for idle to update ratings. I thought a lot about how to prevent changes while user scrolling the list. At this moment user have a pause button, to do it manually, but your suggestion looks more useful. Thanks!
- snowpanda 11y ago
  This is very resourceful, you should make a dark theme that's easy on the eyes, that would make this perfect.
  - vadimbaryshev 11y ago
    Thank you. I already have a dark concept and I will try to release it as soon as I find a good place to put a switch.
- Bocker 11y ago
  Nice service! It would be interesting to see some grouping of stories. Some stories appear many times from different sources.
  - vadimbaryshev 11y ago
    Yes, I agree it would be a great feature. But it looks like that I need some more knowledge in machine-learning, to do this job well. Maybe in future I will be able to do it.
x5n1 11y ago
Just made me think about how much time I could waste reading utterly useless information. News, never again! Good concept though and good execution.
- edc117 11y ago
  Not to be snarky, but isn't that what you're doing on HN? ;)
  - x5n1 11y ago
    Most stuff here is not useless.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
Campbellb 11y ago
Is there an API available/in the works so people can play with this data?
- aceofskies05 11y ago
  I too would like an API.
- vadimbaryshev1 11y ago
  There is no API right now, but i'm thinking about it. Because the service is free for users, free for sources, and free from ads, I thinking about data-mining as monetization method.
- iqonik 11y ago
  I would use and pay for API access too.
  - iqonik 11y ago
    A POST request to https://top.st/top/1/GB https://top.st/top/1/GB is good enough for my needs. Can you email me commercials if you would allow me to do so (email in my profile).
    - vadimbaryshev 11y ago
      This API intended for internal use only and not allowed to use outside top.st and it can be changed at any moment. I hope you understand that i spending many resources to collect all of this data and keeping it actual in real time and it can't be free for use. But it's possible to create any API for your needs as a paid service. I'm planning to create complex data-mining service based on this data in future, but for now you can explain your needs and we can thinking about possible solutions together. Feel free to contact me by e-mail mail@top.st or my personal e-mail: vadimbaryshev@gmail.com
nemmonszz 11y ago
This is pretty cool. The one thing that i noticed is that there are a lot of 'duplicates', in the sense of one event being covered by a ton of different websites and then being shown multiple times. I'm wondering if would be possible to use some sort of string pattern matching algorithm (perhaps bolstered by comparing article submission times?) to group 'like' stories together to mitigate this effect, perhaps allowing a the user to expand a given group to see all of the stories pertaining to that 'event' in order of popularity.
Allvitende 11y ago
Good stuff. Been looking for something like this for a while. You plugging into all their APIs or are you scraping?
yoha 11y ago
Two short remarks: * it would be nice to have a static <noscript> version, or at least a message asking to enable Javascript, rather that seeing the templates * I was going to make a remark on the automatic updates, but I finally spotted the "pause "button; maybe make it a little more obvious? Otherwise, the website looks really fast and neat and the country filter is very handy!
niico 11y ago
Very interesting! My only (design) suggestion: The H1 title looks like a logo. I'd add a logo there and move the H1 to somewhere more visible (At least for the first few months of the site) Funny, a couple weeks ago we launched our Chrome extension that sends you a notification every time there is a top story on HN also called TOP. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653) :D
el33th4xx0r 11y ago
Rather than currently or soon-to-be trending, is there any application/website that compile last week or month trends? I'm not interested in knowing whats trending today, but I don't want to be completely out of the loop either.
- wordlink 11y ago
  http://wordlink.com/monthly http://wordlink.com/monthly http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup http://wordlink.com/weekly http://wordlink.com/weekly (Front page is daily)
- wordlink 11y ago
  You can visualize trends at http://analytics.wordlink.com/monthly http://analytics.wordlink.com/monthly Or use any url from main page but replace the subdomain.
vadimbaryshev1 11y ago
Thanks all for your replies. It's really very helpful. Unfortunately HN says that I commenting too fast. But I promise, that I reply for all questions as soon as possible.
317070 11y ago
In Belgium here, and somehow the website figured out I speak dutch (which is quite correct) and used i18n which I presume is written by a Frenchman studying medieval Dutch. So maybe allow me to switch to English i18n, like I always do, or look for a better translator for dutch. Right now, the logo for example has 4 words and 2 grammar mistakes. So the use of dutch i18n is really bad if you want more users in the Netherlands. Just a heads up. Looks very interesting otherwise, might use it as my landing page. I'm that kind of news-junkie.
- vadimbaryshev1 11y ago
  Thanks for your suggestion. I temporary switched all locales to english.
oconnore 11y ago
What is the value in being so current? Unless you are doing HFT or disaster response, you probably want to get your news distilled, curated, in batch form, and aggregated over some time. Where is the Sunday paper of the internet?
dang 11y ago
Sockpuppet votes and comments are not allowed on Hacker News.
nathcd 11y ago
Looks cool. My one gripe: it looks like there's a footer when I switch between time intervals, but it's impossible to get to since the stories continue loading as I scroll down.
pierre_massat 11y ago
Very cool. I like how you update the list. Page up/down doesn't seem to work though. Edit: my bad, my focus was still on the country dropdown.
clusterfoo 11y ago
this is great! -- would be nice to add categories / filters. Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's not so much a black box.
- vadimbaryshev 11y ago
  Categories will be added in a few weeks. And each link will be have a chart with historyc data.
ch215 11y ago
Bookmarked. This is a great website, simple design well executed, but I'll give you my gripes, too. First thing I'd do? Get rid of the blurred background for readability's sake, it makes me feel like I've got glaucoma. Also, I whitelist scripts and I'm oddly outraged when I land on a page which hardly functions without. At least tell me I have to enable JS. It's a minor thing but first impressions and all. I'm intrinsically uncomfortable with websites moving without my say so but it may grow on me in this case (just don't over do it ;). The only other thing that's grinding my gears is more general and counterintuitive. Namely, news being weighted toward what people want to read, rather than need to read. However, I'm probably just being an idealist... after all, who doesn't need to see a raccoon riding an alligator? Edit: Just found the pause button, it's a good compromise.
wordlink 11y ago
We built this 2 years ago and applied to Ycomb with no luck both years. Everyone we have uses it everyday but it's difficult to penetrate the publishing market. Still we work with large marketing firms to offer intelligence services. Full text searchable http://wordlink.com http://wordlink.com and http://analytics.wordlink.com http://analytics.wordlink.com

38 points by vadimbaryshev 11y ago

Hello HN, I created trending news aggregation service called TOP.ST. Ratings are based on people's social network activity and updates in real-time. At the moment the service works in 29 countries. More countries are coming in future. In next updates I planning to add news categories and thinking about e-mail digest. I'm looking for a feedback. Feel free to ask me any questions here or by e-mail: mail@top.st

blfr 11y ago
It looks good and seems to capture the vibe of the moment well. Any details on how it works? Which networks do you monitor? Is it just Twitter? How do you know where people are from? Do you go by language? Only take into account tweets with geo information?
- eugeneross 11y ago
  Yes! I too would love to know how it works under the hood!
  - wordlink 11y ago
    Checkout buzzsumo.com and a free version that we built wordlink.com. It gathers all the news in the world (mostly) then sorts it by its aggregated social activity. Likes shares comments tweets pins upvotes, on facebook twitter linkedin google plus reddit pinterest etc... It's also a search engine used by marketing companies to analyze the news. Scrapy twisted python crawlers and elasticsearch backend for indexing.
    - wordlink 11y ago
      Example links: http://wordlink.com http://wordlink.com http://wordlink.com/video http://wordlink.com/video http://wordlink.com/barack+obama http://wordlink.com/barack+obama http://wordlink.com/nytimes.com http://wordlink.com/nytimes.com
- vadimbaryshev 11y ago
  I monitoring 7 networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn for the World and VK, Odnoklassniki for Russia. GEO targeting by source popularity in country.
- mmahemoff 11y ago
  Not OP but I'll hazard a guess it looks for URLs which appear at an accelerating rate on Twitter, using a whitelist of domain sources (since we see several frequent domains). One feedback is I'd avoid the animation effect until the user has been idle for a few seconds.
  - vadimbaryshev 11y ago
    Excellent idea about waiting for idle to update ratings. I thought a lot about how to prevent changes while user scrolling the list. At this moment user have a pause button, to do it manually, but your suggestion looks more useful. Thanks!
snowpanda 11y ago
This is very resourceful, you should make a dark theme that's easy on the eyes, that would make this perfect.
- vadimbaryshev 11y ago
  Thank you. I already have a dark concept and I will try to release it as soon as I find a good place to put a switch.
Bocker 11y ago
Nice service! It would be interesting to see some grouping of stories. Some stories appear many times from different sources.
- vadimbaryshev 11y ago
  Yes, I agree it would be a great feature. But it looks like that I need some more knowledge in machine-learning, to do this job well. Maybe in future I will be able to do it.

x5n1 11y ago

Just made me think about how much time I could waste reading utterly useless information. News, never again! Good concept though and good execution.

edc117 11y ago
Not to be snarky, but isn't that what you're doing on HN? ;)
- x5n1 11y ago
  Most stuff here is not useless.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

Campbellb 11y ago

Is there an API available/in the works so people can play with this data?

aceofskies05 11y ago
I too would like an API.
vadimbaryshev1 11y ago
There is no API right now, but i'm thinking about it. Because the service is free for users, free for sources, and free from ads, I thinking about data-mining as monetization method.
iqonik 11y ago
I would use and pay for API access too.
- iqonik 11y ago
  A POST request to https://top.st/top/1/GB https://top.st/top/1/GB is good enough for my needs. Can you email me commercials if you would allow me to do so (email in my profile).
  - vadimbaryshev 11y ago
    This API intended for internal use only and not allowed to use outside top.st and it can be changed at any moment. I hope you understand that i spending many resources to collect all of this data and keeping it actual in real time and it can't be free for use. But it's possible to create any API for your needs as a paid service. I'm planning to create complex data-mining service based on this data in future, but for now you can explain your needs and we can thinking about possible solutions together. Feel free to contact me by e-mail mail@top.st or my personal e-mail: vadimbaryshev@gmail.com

nemmonszz 11y ago

This is pretty cool. The one thing that i noticed is that there are a lot of 'duplicates', in the sense of one event being covered by a ton of different websites and then being shown multiple times. I'm wondering if would be possible to use some sort of string pattern matching algorithm (perhaps bolstered by comparing article submission times?) to group 'like' stories together to mitigate this effect, perhaps allowing a the user to expand a given group to see all of the stories pertaining to that 'event' in order of popularity.

Allvitende 11y ago

Good stuff. Been looking for something like this for a while. You plugging into all their APIs or are you scraping?

yoha 11y ago

Two short remarks: * it would be nice to have a static <noscript> version, or at least a message asking to enable Javascript, rather that seeing the templates * I was going to make a remark on the automatic updates, but I finally spotted the "pause "button; maybe make it a little more obvious? Otherwise, the website looks really fast and neat and the country filter is very handy!

niico 11y ago

Very interesting! My only (design) suggestion: The H1 title looks like a logo. I'd add a logo there and move the H1 to somewhere more visible (At least for the first few months of the site) Funny, a couple weeks ago we launched our Chrome extension that sends you a notification every time there is a top story on HN also called TOP. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653) :D

el33th4xx0r 11y ago

Rather than currently or soon-to-be trending, is there any application/website that compile last week or month trends? I'm not interested in knowing whats trending today, but I don't want to be completely out of the loop either.

wordlink 11y ago
http://wordlink.com/monthly http://wordlink.com/monthly http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup http://wordlink.com/weekly http://wordlink.com/weekly (Front page is daily)
wordlink 11y ago
You can visualize trends at http://analytics.wordlink.com/monthly http://analytics.wordlink.com/monthly Or use any url from main page but replace the subdomain.

vadimbaryshev1 11y ago

Thanks all for your replies. It's really very helpful. Unfortunately HN says that I commenting too fast. But I promise, that I reply for all questions as soon as possible.

317070 11y ago

In Belgium here, and somehow the website figured out I speak dutch (which is quite correct) and used i18n which I presume is written by a Frenchman studying medieval Dutch. So maybe allow me to switch to English i18n, like I always do, or look for a better translator for dutch. Right now, the logo for example has 4 words and 2 grammar mistakes. So the use of dutch i18n is really bad if you want more users in the Netherlands. Just a heads up. Looks very interesting otherwise, might use it as my landing page. I'm that kind of news-junkie.

vadimbaryshev1 11y ago
Thanks for your suggestion. I temporary switched all locales to english.

oconnore 11y ago

What is the value in being so current? Unless you are doing HFT or disaster response, you probably want to get your news distilled, curated, in batch form, and aggregated over some time. Where is the Sunday paper of the internet?

dang 11y ago

Sockpuppet votes and comments are not allowed on Hacker News.

nathcd 11y ago

Looks cool. My one gripe: it looks like there's a footer when I switch between time intervals, but it's impossible to get to since the stories continue loading as I scroll down.

pierre_massat 11y ago

Very cool. I like how you update the list. Page up/down doesn't seem to work though. Edit: my bad, my focus was still on the country dropdown.

clusterfoo 11y ago

this is great! -- would be nice to add categories / filters. Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's not so much a black box.

vadimbaryshev 11y ago
Categories will be added in a few weeks. And each link will be have a chart with historyc data.

ch215 11y ago

Bookmarked. This is a great website, simple design well executed, but I'll give you my gripes, too. First thing I'd do? Get rid of the blurred background for readability's sake, it makes me feel like I've got glaucoma. Also, I whitelist scripts and I'm oddly outraged when I land on a page which hardly functions without. At least tell me I have to enable JS. It's a minor thing but first impressions and all. I'm intrinsically uncomfortable with websites moving without my say so but it may grow on me in this case (just don't over do it ;). The only other thing that's grinding my gears is more general and counterintuitive. Namely, news being weighted toward what people want to read, rather than need to read. However, I'm probably just being an idealist... after all, who doesn't need to see a raccoon riding an alligator? Edit: Just found the pause button, it's a good compromise.

wordlink 11y ago

We built this 2 years ago and applied to Ycomb with no luck both years. Everyone we have uses it everyday but it's difficult to penetrate the publishing market. Still we work with large marketing firms to offer intelligence services. Full text searchable http://wordlink.com http://wordlink.com and http://analytics.wordlink.com http://analytics.wordlink.com