

Karma Widget: Display Your YC (and other) Karma - epi0Bauqu
http://duckduckgo.com/karma.html

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spage
A good example of a novel minor marketing effort for your start-up. An
excellent idea. Putting together something small like the Karma Widget is an
enjoyable diversion to boot. We all need those once in a while.

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jonnytran
The real kicker here is that he's giving people incentive to group together
all their profiles across the web, allowing Duck Duck Go to search people
better than anyone else.

That's genius!

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epi0Bauqu
This gives me a bit too much foresight credit. Honestly, I got the idea for
these widgets after seeing one too many comments like this one:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=379936>. I agree with that thread that
your YC karma isn't too useful on other sites, but then I realized it would be
useful to display on your own sites.

So I got to building it... I quickly realized that there is karma on other
sites, and it might be cool to aggregate. Then I realized I could possibly
generate some new Duck Duck Go users this way. Then I realized (by someone
indirectly pointing it out to me), that there are SEO implications when
deploying widgets.

But I didn't think (until your comment) about improving search by aggregating
profile information :). Just to be clear wrt privacy, we're not currently
storing any IP info or the aggregate usernames in the DB, and have no plans to
do so: <http://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html>

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paul9290
Such karma across many platforms and that is verified by trusted contacts(your
friends) will prove in general to be extremely powerful for semantic/social
services!

For example an idea of mine is to create a Rotten Tomatoes meets Twitter.
Instead of indexing/compiling trusted press/bloggers I want a web-service/site
that reads, understands and compiles all the reviews on Twitter about each
movie. Right now I have to search tons and tons of Twitter search pages, as
opposed to a web-service doing this automatically and presenting it in a
simple UI. This same idea can be applied to tons of topics..restuarants,
hotels, etc, etc....

One issue with this idea is it can be gamed easily, but not if this service
only reads, understands and compiles from trusted/verified sources (karma
being a good way to achieve this).

Might be abstract, but 1st time writing this idea/thought out!

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epi0Bauqu
You are not your job. You are not your online profiles. You are not your YC
karma. But hey, that shouldn't stop you from displaying it...

Sister "Profiles" Widget: <http://duckduckgo.com/profiles.html>

Live examples: <http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/>

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mhartl
Oh noes! There's no easy way to get from the widget page to your main page.
Maybe you should link the top image to '/'?

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epi0Bauqu
Good call. Done.

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mhartl
Well done, sir. (P.S. I'm not my fucking khakis. :-)

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felixc
If people would just stop caring about meaningless numbers displayed next to
your username, the world would be a better place. Specifically, the world of
community-moderated sites wouldn't have to put up with crap submissions that
exist solely to gather up-votes.

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jrockway
What makes you think that karma is meaningless? I find it meaningful.

Sometimes I read a troll-like post, and check out the user that wrote it. If
they have 3000 karma, it is likely that I am missing their point, and need to
think some more. If they have -10 karma, then they are probably just a troll.

I know it's "bad" to judge someone by a number... but we do it because it is
usually helpful.

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felixc
What you describe is the intended, valid use of the metric. What I am
complaining about is people who care on a personal level about what their own
karma is, and who do things _just to inflate that number_. Facebook/Myspace
"friends" whom you don't actually know? "Vote up if *" posts? Lolcat or comic
or whatever posts? I know HN is (mostly) blissfully free of these things, but
they are a direct consequence of the karma system.

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dangoldin
Great way to get new people to go your site!

It's lots of small stuff like this that gets people to go to your site.

Very clever way to spread your presence to other sites!

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Alex3917
Suggested additions: Facebook friends and feedburner subscribers.

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epi0Bauqu
Noted. Thought about both, but didn't see an easy way to integrate, so put
off. Anyone know of any easy way? Feedburner seems only to serve images of the
#, and FB seems to require auth.

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epi0Bauqu
Here's the way for Feedburner:
[http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=Hack...](http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=HackerWatrCoolr)

~~~
epi0Bauqu
Unfortunately, this returns 0 for most feeds right now, and is apparently a
known bug: [http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-for-
developers/bro...](http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-for-
developers/browse_thread/thread/d296004b9b019747/d88eabdd03b61f4e?lnk=gst&q=awareness#d88eabdd03b61f4e)

I will add Feedburner when they fix this (I hope soon).

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djworth
Added it to my new site hosted on GAE <http://www.danworth.com>

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nirmal
I was just working on simple widget that showed my last few comments with
links back to HN. Although I'm having mixed feelings about using it on my
homepage.

~~~
raju
Makes me think... maybe its time BackType came up with a widget... yes? Might
save you the trouble.

www.backtype.com

Of course it won't help with your predicament, but it will be easier in case
you do decide to display your HN comments.

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omakase
Hey Raju, we do have widgets :) and you can definitely use it to display HN
comments (although not karma): <http://www.backtype.com/widgets>

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raju
Woops! Sorry. My bad. Should have looked harder before commenting. My
apologies.

~~~
omakase
No worries, they're a bit hard to find.

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sh1mmer
Facebook is such a noticeable absence. It'll be nice when they are open. Not
that I'm holding my breath.

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lazyant
It works for me for YC but not for reddit.

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epi0Bauqu
reddit username?

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epi0Bauqu
lazyant, duh...

reddit timed out on your initial request. Tried it again, and it worked. Maybe
I can find a way to use their so-called "secret api"...

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lazyant
Hi,

Thanks for looking into this and good guess on the username ;-). It's still
showing '0' though, in case that helps.

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epi0Bauqu
Refresh--the JS is probably cached (set for a day). I see 210 in the DB.

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lazyant
yep, it's working. Nice tool.

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sahaj
karma, the new celebrity status symbol.

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prakash
Smart idea!

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lst
All of you high karma folks around:

'Karma' is a quite recent invention, in fact it dates only a few years back.
Everything growing so fast is always exposed to dissolve in even less time...

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trezor
Err no.

Slashdot had karma-points long before they shifted to simply "Good" or
"Excellent" and stuff like that.

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lst
How 'old' is internet itself? Not more than the mentioned 'few' years.

Really important (and great) things grow slowly and die slowly.

