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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 mom

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.

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.