

Ask HN: please review SmartPeople - ritonlajoie

Hi everyone,<p>I made a website that allows you to 'follow' any hacker-newser. I think such a service is needed, because this kind of great website is 'comment' centered.<p>The principle: you get an e-mail with the comment of your idol everytime he comments on HN (with a slight delay because I don't want to request the site too much). This will personally help me a lot to follow patio11 :)<p>Thanks for reviewing SmartPeople, and If in the near future you are still using it, you'll find out that I'm adding reddit and some other boards you may belong to.<p>Please allow a 30 min/one hour delay between the comment crawlings.<p>Site : http://nasr.ath.cx<p>Edit: my english...
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andymoe
Sort of a creepy idea. But no more so than Facebook or twitter I guess. I long
for the days when people, myself included, hid their real contact info and
used a pseudonym.

edit: Also, the pencil's pixilation is distracting and I think you should get
rid of the alpha effect that goes away when hovering over the logo. (Safari
5.0.1)

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fgf
I don't see this as creepy at all, have you never checked PGs latest comments
or that of a commenter with interests/opinions you share?

anyway, thank you for making this!

ps. I'd prefer rss

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ritonlajoie
Sure, I'll try to add RSS in the weekend. Thanks for your kind words !

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ashleyw
Clickable: <http://nasr.ath.cx>

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ecaron
Given any thought to putting this on GitHub? I'd love to see OpenID support
rolled in, but people posting "I want this" could put their money where their
mouth is - by adding it themselves!

PS: Did we just talk recently about LinkUp.com?

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troygoode
Great idea, I would contribute (or try - I have no actual Drupal experience).

I'd love to see a sorted list of the top N followed people. I imagine pg would
be #1, but it very well could be patio11. Seeing #3-10 would be very
interesting.

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ritonlajoie
Well, I can tell you patio11 and pg are on the top list, but I don't have many
users right now !

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kashif
Well, I was designing something similar to make it easier to track submissions
by people who I consider a good source of interesting articles. Unfortunately,
what time of day you make a submission has a significant impact on whether it
gets to the home page and from there into my reading diet. I don't enjoy all
the content on the home page, and would rather read some submissions that have
only a few votes but were made by members who are interested in the same
subject as me.

So, a feature request, please add a way to follow submissions by specific
people on the web not on email - an alternate home page, much like a twitter
stream.

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ritonlajoie
thanks for commenting. well,I'll trynto fit that in my todolist!thanks for the
idea.

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tnorthcutt
Just saw this, posted in a duplicate thread (why's there a duplicate...?)
Reposting here: Nice idea. Haven't registered, so forgive the ignorant
question, but are daily digest emails an option? If not, I'd suggest making
them one. Also, suggested users to follow would be neat, similar to Amazon's
"other people who bought x also bought y".

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ritonlajoie
thanks for sharing you thougts.all of that is on my todo list.the thing is,i
made that this afternoon in 2 hours..i didnt expect such a success ;)

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KeithMajhor
It'd be really cool if you brought in the content of articles. That way you
could follow real people outside of the Hacker News community (assuming that
the content was posted on Hacker News). Then if a public figure like say, John
Resig, made a post to his website I could get that in my feed as well.

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ritonlajoie
Thanks, it's in my todo list :) Will keep you updated !

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akkartik
Great idea. I tried something similar a couple of years ago:
[http://blog.hystry.com/post/20252078/my-favorite-
commenters-...](http://blog.hystry.com/post/20252078/my-favorite-commenters-
on-hacker-news)

But it wasn't designed from the ground up for following _people_.

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harscoat
Did you think of a directory of HNers (with their about) we could follow?

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ritonlajoie
You can use <http://news.ycombinator.com/lists> which is a good start to get
high quality user lists.

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kyenneti
Great idea. Do you mind asking this - How are you managing your email delivery
? Are you using any email delivery networks or managing yourself.
Congratulations on the launch.

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ritonlajoie
Thanks !! I'm using a gmail account for now.

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die_sekte
Chrome 5.0.375.125 on Mac Snow Leopard: Some kind of layout error. The right
part doesn't float properly or something. I'm not sure what causes this.

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jordanmessina
Is this what you're talking about? The layout is messed up for me in my manage
area: <http://twitpic.com/2cjzay>

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ritonlajoie
Thanks. I'm sorry the pictures seems to have been deleted. I don't have a mac,
but will try to install Safari asap.

edit: It's back on twitpic! yay Ok ! Will have a look

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ulvund
Chrome @ Mac

<http://i.imgur.com/TqZJR.png>

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ritonlajoie
thanks ! Which browser are you using ? (Safari ?)

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zaveri
<http://nasr.ath.cx>

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samratjp
Instead of email, I'd rather get growl or notifo like messages.

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ritonlajoie
Hmm I never heard about those. Will have a look. I'm thinking of adding
twitter. Say, you have a twitter account. You enter your twitter name in your
profile info on PeopleSmart. You'll then receive notifications on Twitter
(also, or only, as you wish). What do you think ?

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ritonlajoie
I added the ability to follow a thread ! Thanks for testing !

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rick_2047
Well this is good but what I would really like (and was just thinking about
since yesterday) would be the ability to follow a conversation. Some time on
an article, the a particular thread starts to become much more interesting
than the story itself. At those times (and it happens very often) I wish HN
would allow me to "watch" that thread. Sure I can bookmark the link of the
thread, but its just a pain to maintain that. And also I usually forget to
open it again

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vyrotek
And on top of this, I would love the ability to know which comments were added
since the last time I viewed the thread. Sometimes posts like 'Review my app'
get a lot of feedback and spawn multiple discussions, but I can't easily tell
which were new comments from the last time I looked. I can only see that the
'comment count' increased.

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johnwatson11218
Seems like I watched a demo of google wave online and it had stuff just like
this. I thought that google wave would have been a perfect replacement for the
threaded discussion model that we have here.

These discussions seemed too short lived for my taste. I know that many people
come up with insightful observations after they think about an issue for a day
or two. By then the story is off the front page and what is the use in making
the comment?

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rick_2047
_These discussions seemed too short lived for my taste. I know that many
people come up with insightful observations after they think about an issue
for a day or two. By then the story is off the front page and what is the use
in making the comment?_

We really need to solve this. People have a tendency to comment only on things
which are on front page. This is in part the fault of being karma centric and
also the sheer volume of traffic.

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whatusername
General web forum software (phpBB etc) all solve this - bumping the most
recent commented piece to the top of the forum. Digg/Reddit/HN broke this
mould,,

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vyrotek
Exactly, there needs to be a separate feature/page where submissions are
sorted by most recent comment date.

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itistoday
Nice idea!

I noticed though that you're including the user's password in the confirmation
email. This isn't recommended for security reasons (as it's easy to intercept,
and users often use the same password for multiple services). Also, I hope
you're storing the salted hash of the password on your server (as opposed to
the actual password).

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ritonlajoie
thanks! i use drupal,the security is quitengood.in the db,a hash is stored,the
only clear pass is in the mail.i ll try to change that,you are right.

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hotmind
Consider integrating Slashdot into your service. I love Slashdot, and the
comments there are the best anywhere.

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ritonlajoie
sure,I plan to have it.I am an avid reader of SDot!have you registered?that
way you would receive email updates on improvepents!

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hotmind
I am registered :)

