Hi Ian,
Welcome to Storylane, a place for great inspirational life stories. So that we can help you get started, here are some of things you can do on Storylane:
Share stories
Everyone has amazing life stories to tell, and so do you! Sometimes the only thing you need to get started is a good suggestion for some inspiration. Start sharing stories »
Ask anyone to tell a great story
Whether it's your friend or someone you look up to, everyone has amazing life stories. Storylane makes it easy for you to ask people to tell their stories. Find people and ask them for stories!
Save the ones you love
Storylane is full of great stories, and it's easy to discover those close to your heart. Show your love for great stories, save them for later and then get back to them in times of need. Find stories to love!
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Once you're logged in, it looks sort of like a Kickstarter full of... blog entries. Some could be considered actual essays while others have pretty much posted lists, extended anecdotes, there's an iPhone 5 review, etc... The main feature I guess is that you can cycle through prompts from an array of categories to give you something to write about. Of course in the early stages they're pretty hit or miss, but I imagine there is potential if users ended up carving out their own niches– you might start to see more things like "How did you start programming? What do you think were the most important things that helped you grow?". Of course they're just prompts, and you should be able to write about anything you want.
Weird that most of the users who i browsed through, seem to not be actual users and are just syndicated from existing blogs. (with the owners permission ?!)
1) Make that ol' fashioned signup link just a little more obvious...
2) Could the two welcome emails be combined (can't the activation link come as part of the second if the subject line makes it clear)?
3) I couldn't help but laugh when "What are your best memories of graduate school? Worst memories?" came up as a prompt under "Life". There's something amusing about this question being posed so innocently after "Did you have a pet?".
Anyway I think the site is actually pretty fun, and I'm glad I signed up despite not being able to tell what it was just from the homepage (might want to change that). I was just about to go to bed and jot down a few things I wanted to write about the coming morning but after poking around I may just spend some more time poking around with some of the topics here.
I like the sound of "A library of human experiences" - it grabs me more than "People sharing things that matter".
Perhaps there is an example or demo you could make public, to give less adventurous visitors (like me) an idea of what it does? (edit: like the /gauss link I just noticed - now I like it)
Since upvotes aren't shown, I just want to say that I prefer "A library of human experiences" too. The current subtitle makes it sounds more like a social network for friends and families than a open community.
Point taken, and it seems to be a common thread. We need to think about how to do this better.
The reason we care about registrations is because we look at it as a community not a marketplace for content.
Building a bad community, not setting precedent, training up people and solidifying a culture are pretty lethal to your stated goal.
Once you are open to all, your constant battle will always be:
1) Not let the Signal to Noise ratio degenerate
2) Be able to split the Signal down into sub categories for people to process, as opposed to a torrent which then leads to arbitrary discarding of significant data.
You bring two very important points. I agree that creating the right community and the right precedent is Key, but I don't think you need to be closed in order to achieve this. On the contrary, I think one needs to build a system that cana achieve that And be open. From our point a view, is actually an imperative: we Must be able to do it. We simply don't like close, invite only systems. The reasons probably will fit better in another thread.
With regards to managing signal to noise: 100% agree. Figuring out how to slice and dice the content so that you see what matters to You is our number one "tactical" objective. It is actually a hard problem, but one that gets easier as you come to understand the content being created and once you can benefit from enough liquidity to slice and dice at will.
We reasoned that the signed-in experience is a lot richer than what we could show signed-out on the landing page, but perhaps we should not take it to such an extreme :)
Please, this is how you execute this idea......http://cowbird.com. I did not sign up because i have no idea what the product does and the alternate to Facebook login blends into the background and is hard to notice.
It would have been nice to have seen OpenID succeed into no-brainer non-geek use. As it is, it's like an artisan pencil that's really useful and no one's heard of, made of renewable bamboo pulp and non-toxic "lead" that can be erased with the non-point end which is merely an extension of the bamboo, shredded at the factory into a small brush. (Hey, did I just invent something?)
Simple WHOIS shows that storylane.com is online since 2003 (although this service probably wasn't there, but I am a user of storylane since about march 2012) and remenis.com was created on 18-Jun-12, so you've got that clone the other way around.
I know the founder of remenis.com he explained to me the idea in Dec 2011. But good luck to everyone, I was never super impressed with the idea in the first place. Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?
> Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?
My answer would be: focus. It's nice that you visited YetAnotherCon 2012, and created ten blog posts about it, but honestly, I don't really care.
Storylane focuses on telling stories. http://folklore.org, which does something similar, although even more focussed, is a fantastic read. My hope is that similar intriguing insights into people's lives pop up on Storylane.
>> I know the founder of remenis.com he explained to me the idea in Dec 2011
That's good for him, but you can hardly clone something, that's an idea in someone's had, right? Thus it seems that - shocker - there was no cloning involved.
>> Whats the difference between this and blogging socially on wordpress.com or blogger or tumblr?
I bet that the authors can explain this better than I can (if they haven't yet in this post on HN)
Zorbo provides a good answer: Focus. Both in what the Tool does and also what it is used for; to wit, we created Storylane to build a library of human experiences and opinions. We created Storylane to focus on what matters. This is partly achieved by the tool itself and how it works, partly by the community and how is being collectively crafted. The key operative word here is actually "being" as in we have been doing this for a couple of weeks and the focus that I am describing is pretty much in the making
What the hell does it do? I'm not signing up without knowing a single thing about this service.