

Ask HN: Organizing information on the web (startup idea) - syntonic

Hi HN,<p>I've been working on a web idea the past couple of months, and I was hoping to get some constructive feedback.<p>I want to try to make a site where people can create, update and share collections (databases) of information. Essentially, I want to make a 'Wikipedia of databases', where content is completely driven by individuals who want to organize information on the web. One of my goals is to centralize a lot of redundant, factual information, and to create comprehensive data sources which can be consumed by other sites through an API.<p>What do you think?<p>http://curio.org
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zalew
The idea is cool, actually I had one like this about 10 years ago but didn't
have the guts to launch it :)

I got some criticism towards the GUI (although you took the good direction to
keep it simple). I hate the endless scroll. Endless scrolls are cool for
fooling around browsing pics, etc. not for browsing organized data - it just
doesn't make sense in this context. Boxes desperately need padding, everything
is too cluttered. Try sharpening the color scheme and use a cool sans-serif
font from google webfonts, it'll make it visually more appealing.

The name is great.

What's the tech behind it? Some schemaless db I suppose? Data sources - Wiki
lists or you entered the 'fake it till you make it' batch by hand?

It needs an API, without a dead-simple API it won't bring enough additional
value to f.ex. browsing wikipedia lists (the data is already there), IMO.

Keep up

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syntonic
Thank you for the comments.

I mostly agree with you on the UI, but I wouldn't say endless scroll doesn't
make sense in this context. Even though I'm really not a big fan of it, in my
mind, I'm going for data that is easily 'discoverable'. I don't see why
browsing organized data can't be like fooling around, browsing through pics :)
But, I see your point.

The tech is actually butt simple. The client is JQuery (mostly ajax calls) and
the server is just PHP and MySQL. I use MySQL in a 'meta' way because it's
essentially a database of databases. I think it would be fun to switch to some
NoSQL DBMS sometime in the future.

At the moment, I'm just faking the data by hand. I have some ideas for where
to pull data from. I just Googled Wikipida lists - thanks I'll definitely
check it out :)

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mcrider
Pretty cool, and I think you're getting in on a quickly growing field -- Open
data. IMO, the key to success for your site would be a great API and some
interesting tools that use it (e.g. Visualization tools)

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aoe
Great idea. Hard to execute. I've been trying to find organized lists of data
on some topics for the last few days, but haven't found a single reliable
site.

As you're looking for user contributions, getting traction would be the
hardest part. Good luck!

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syntonic
Thanks! Care to share what kinds of lists you were looking for? I might as
well try to populate it with content that I know people want.

