

Ask HN: Review my startup, circcle.com - Circcle

Hi, we are looking for feedback on circcle.com, a site focusing on news videos.<p>We monitor world's major news agencies for videos on the latest stories, and sort them out by channels and events. Users can also personalize news feed.<p>Thanks for your help.
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caffeinewriter
Hmm, nice looking site. There are a few things that irk me with the layout
though.

1\. The header layout bugs the hell out of me. The logo, tagline, then the
login button feel more like a blog post than a header. A little more emphasis
on the logo, a little less on the tagline. Shorten it up, make it concise.
Something short enough to be interesting, yet long enough to make a point. I
know that's kind of general, but that's just my thought.

2\. Make it responsive! If I resize my window, it should resize with it.

3\. Utilize the space! You have a whole window to work with, use it!
Whitespace is dead space. That kind of goes with the responsiveness of the
site, because if you had a grid layout that would expand and contract with the
view, you'd have a lot more of an effective use of space.

Overall, great site.

~~~
pedalpete
I'm going to disagree with caffeinewriter while I sip my coffee.

1) I agree the header could use some work. Having the facebook login below and
your full tagline description in a fairly boring font and colors just doesn't
to it for me. I'd work on this area, as it is a glaring issue with the design
of your site.

2)You could make it responsive, but only to a certain point. Is 3 columns of
videos too much? 4? 5? do some a/b testing and see if a certain column size
results in more videos watched.

Also, where you have a single video per line, if you did make it responsive,
would all the text end up on one line, and therefore leave empty space next to
the video?

3) I completely disagree here. Whites pace is an important design element. I
think you've used it well.

Now for my further comments.

1) the share buttons are awkward as you have them spread out across one long
line. I'd keep them close together, and play with the positioning. You'd
likely automatically assume that the left hand side is the best spot, but that
may not be the case. I think the far-right, and offset from the video might
work, or inline with the video player. I suspect the more these are squeezed
together, the more impact they'll have. They just seem to be floating around
disconnected from the content at this time.

2) I like how your top two items show how many videos are related to that
story. It is a signal in some ways of the importance/popularity of that story.
But why don't the other videos on the page have the same display? I'd like to
see some consistency in that.

~~~
Circcle
Pedalpete,

we think notes next to videos are very important, as they help users decide
whether they want to spend time to watch videos. They also serve as news
headlines, so people can get the basic info right from them. This is why we
decide to pay it safe by showing one video per line, so we are sure we will
have enough room for the title and note.

Regarding those buttons, if we move them closer to the content above, will it
make them less "disconnected"? We put the comment button on the left side
because it is closer to where users start to write comments.

To your last point, the two pictures represent stories, which are collections
of videos of the same events, like "US gun control debate". The video boxes
below are the latest videos of each channel, which are much broader by
definition, like "US news". Channels help people navigate through content and
subscribe, and stories provides in-depth and consistent info. Together they
create a 2-dimension matrix of content at Circcle.

We currently have 9 channels, and 20 stories. The number of channels will be
stable, but we will create new stories quite frequently. There needs a way to
convey the difference between "story" and "channel" on the sign-in people, so
users are not confused because of inconsistency. Very good feedback. Thanks.

------
dobbsbob
Too American-centric. Also didn't the news corps get all uppity with google
because they weren't sending traffic to their pages, since google was
summarizing most of the article on google news for free thus denying them
traffic? Your site also does this I suspect you will be receiving lot's of
letters from newscorp and cnn saying stop, though am thankful for youtube
videos instead of being greeted by 'not available in your geographical
location'

~~~
Circcle
Thanks for the feedback.

1\. In fact there are 391 US news videos and 727 world news videos. We are
also evaluting the idea to break"World news" into several buckets like EU
news, Asia news, etc.

2\. Those websites laready loss the traffic to youtube, not us.

------
damian2000
My two cents, nothing major...

\- I don't 'get' your logo. What is the round thing - a balloon or a speech
bubble? The colour is a poor choice. Why the two CCs.

\- Have you tried having the logo outlined in black or something, to make it
stand out a bit.

\- Other than the logo, I like the layout - simple and easy to use.

~~~
Circcle
The logo is really a home-made product by our developer, which has no design
degree. We are not satisfied with it, and hope it won't drive people away.

At some point, we will definitely re-visit this issue.

------
wingerlang
Serious question here. How is this a startup? I thought "startups" were some
form of business that has just been started. This seems to me just like any
other little website.

~~~
Circcle
The idea behind Circcle is to create a new way for people to get news.

\- with due respect to citizen journalists, we focus exclusively on news
videos from professional agencies.

\- we think a balanced/unbiased view is important, so we collect videos from
multiple sources and put them next to each other for viewers to decide what to
believe, which also saves people's time to go to different websites or keep
switching TV channels. Diversity is valuable when it comes to information
business.

\- we think mobile is the future, so we focus on getting the basic operations
right and keep things as simple as possible. Circcle's mobile site allows
people to browse and watch videos on the same page, instead of opening up a
new page for video playing.

------
slajax
Link or it didn't happen.

~~~
Circcle
???

~~~
slajax
There is no link bro.

~~~
Circcle
www.circcle.com

