

Show HN: Free Social Network For Geeks - Xenokitten
http://otakujam.com

======
Xenokitten
Hi, I am the creator of OtakuJam, and this is my first post on HN. I am
looking for testers to help me test and fine tune my new social network
project. I am also offering a contest for active members which ends next month
for a $20 amazon gift card as a little incentive to help me gain some much
needed testers.

Otakujam is a new social network (built on the buddypress engine) aimed at
helping geeks connect with other geeks both online and off. It has entered
open beta on 5/27/14 and is seeking testers to help suggest new features and
test existing features.

It offers many familiar social networking features such as an activity stream
where users can post updates, share photos and videos, and share and comment
on other users' activities.

You can friend other users, or choose to follow them instead - the difference
being that a follow does not require a confirmation from the other user. Users
have complete control over their privacy levels and can choose which profile
fields to make public, hide completely, or show to friends only.

The site's main feature is "Otaku Match" which is a matchmaking script that
allows users to search for other geeks based on the information included in
their profiles. All of the profile fields and data are customized to be of
high relevancy to geek culture and include things such as a user's favorite
anime, or what books they are reading, or their favorite board games. Users'
profile text is automatically converted into hyper links which when clicked,
will take you to a page which displays other users who share these interests.

Most recently (in early July) OtakuJam began to focus on curated news content
from geeky-related RSS feeds. It also added the ability for members of this
social network to add their own articles, game reviews, and editorials which
will appear on the site's front page and news sections, as well as in a
personal blog that each user can access via their OtakuJam profile. I have
plans to add many game reviews and editorials myself over time, but mainly
right now, there's a lot of curated news more so than original content.
Hopefully as time goes on and we get more active members, this will change and
become a more balanced arena for news from the web as well as fresh original
content.

Users can also join and create groups or participate in chat rooms or forums
with other members. There's also an events section where users can post and
search for offline real world events which allows users to search as close as
5 miles or up to 100 miles from any given location.

Users can easily update their OtakuJam profiles by connecting to any of their
social media accounts such as importing their instagram or flickr updates into
Otakujam, or being able to use twitter to tweet out their OtakuJam status
updates. Status updates can include hashtags and mentions which work similar
to twitter in that they alert the person mentioned or help index content based
on topic tags.

New features are being added constantly and a few upcoming features include
the ability to watch streaming anime content and a steam api integration to
display your games and achievements.

If any of this should happen to interest you we would love to see you join up
on the site. Even if you decide not to join, if you have any feedback to give
about the site, feel free to share it here in the comments.

Thanks for taking time to view my post, and have a happy Thursday :)

------
probably_wrong
I have overall two main comments to make:

Point 1: Your site is currently very oriented towards anime (as if the title
didn't make that clear). That's not a bad thing, of course, but you are
advertising the site as "for geeks", both here and in the logo's tagline. So
how about geeks that don't like anime? Or that like it, but don't want to be
associated with the word "otaku"? It seems to me you could benefit from a
slightly more focused approach - I know more than one geek that could not tell
me what "Otome" is, much less "Asian Balljointed Dolls" (which is one of the
first things you see).

Point 2: I think you might want to simplify your user interface a bit. Check
Facebook and Deviantart, for instance: they ask your name, email, sex and
birthday, and that's it. LinkedIn asks for even less. In contrast, I count 14
fields + 8 extra for "Otaku Match", all at once. Check what OkCupid does, too.
I'm sorry I can't give you any specific link about user interface design, but
feel free to PM me if you can't find it yourself and I see what I can find.

Finally, small bug report: the "members" page throws an error ("Geocode was
not successful for the following reasons: OVER_QUERY_LIMIT") on my computer,
and you might want to do something about the "Location: --Not in the United
States--" fields, because you have a lot of activity from Non-US members.
Displaying the country should be enough.

~~~
Xenokitten
Hi thanks for checking out the site :) You make a good point about the "not in
the US" feature. It was orginally because of the events plugin that I was
running required US zipcodes to generate the maps and search results, but I
should probably add a field where people can at least add their country or
search by country.

As the name does suggest, things are geared strongly towards an asian slant on
the word geek, however, there's also a lot of non-asian content, such as
boardgames, photoshop tutorials and "western" videogames, or books, movies,
scifi series, etc. The front page changes a lot since it just pulls in the
latest news articles, which just happened to be asian themed (although I do
agree that many of the articles on the site are as such since it pulls from
rss feeds such as kotaku (who also has otaku in their name :)) and
crunchyroll.

The term Otaku in Japan has a negative connotation, but most anime fans in the
USA have embraced the term and self-identify with it as a positive thing. Much
like how being a geek or nerd used to be a negative thing back in the 80s, and
was popularized by 90s and millennial culture.

I do agree that there are a lot of profile fields. The ones you see in search
though are mostly not required. I culled down a lot of the required fields as
my current testers provided the same feedback :) Initially ALL of those fields
were required because I wanted to differntiate my site from many "dating"
sites (or social networks) where users do not post very detailed descriptions.
I wanted people to be easily able to search for people based on interests, but
if everyone left those interests blank, then no one could search for anyone.
But it was deterring people from signing up. And a social network isn't any
fun without other members lol. :) I am actually considering adding the
buddypress plugin that will allow users to signup/login with their existing
social media profiles. Though I do hate the fact that there will be a lot of
blank profiles on the site if I do so.

I will look into the bug. I have noticed it too but it seems to be a non-
breaking bug. It is annoying since it pops up 3 times. I'm only a fledgling
developer (which is why I'm using buddypress in the first place :)). I can do
css and hack up some stuff in php, but a lot of things are still over my head
so I will have to see if I can find a way to prevent the popup.

Thanks again for the feedback :)

------
Xenokitten
Changed the way the search functions work, to target specific sub categories
of the geek culture. For example, techies can search for users with specific
software skills or share their love for a specific smartphone or operating
system by using the "Tech-Match" script. While Gaming geeks can search for
video, card, console, and board game players with "Game Match"; and Book worms
can find others who like the same books (or comics) and authors with "Book
Match". Several other subsets and matches exist as well.

These are accessible via the top navigation or via big bright CSS buttons
along the right side of each page. Thus eliminating the need for the somewhat
overwhelming lengthy search script which is still accessible via the Advanced
Search button (or top navigation).

Also removed the maps from the members directory as that was the cause of the
query errors there. Maps still function for the meetup portion of the site.

------
Xenokitten
Made several changes to the layout of the site and streamlined the
registration process. Still looking for testers, still trying to give away a
free $20 amazon gift card :) still no one is eligible.

------
Xenokitten
After thinking about it more, I have decreased the fields required to
register, but have not allowed for social sign in, in order to preserve
username enforcement to follow buddypress usernames for site functionality
(messaging, mentions, follows, etc)

