

Show HN: Forkbin lets you fork public lists - jmtame
http://www.forkbin.com

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shazow
Very nice! I've been toying with a similar idea for a while too, here's some
feedback and ideas from my own project:

\- Bug: Don't let me create empty list items.

\- Definitely let people make private link-only anonymous lists without being
logged in, then let them claim (ie. fork into an account) when they make an
account.

\- Have an embed code, so that you can make a list and embed it in a blog post
or whatnot. Then you can maintain the list on forkbin without worrying about
updating your blog post every time something changes.

\- If you let people include media in the content (top music videos? best
photos of X? etc), then they can use it for much more than you originally
planned.

Also, think about what kinds of lists you want to optimize for. I've been
trying to break down all types of lists into a small set of orthogonal
categories, this is what I've come up with: <https://gist.github.com/2467329>
(feedback welcome--note that maintaining this list and accepting feedback is a
pain itself).

Best of luck!

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wamatt
Quite a cool idea, nice! :)

Suggestion, might be friendlier to let us play with the app first, before
requiring an upfront commitment to register.

After clicking the "Fork" button, and then seeing that form... CMD-W and onto
the other 20 open tabs :p

~~~
jmtame
Thanks! Yeah, I think you're right--registration shouldn't be required to
create or fork a list, especially for newer users who are curious to try it
out for the first time.

~~~
mcantor
Seconded. Having a demo that you can immediately start playing with is
_absolutely vital_ for gaining traction with a novel app.

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fratis
This is cool, but I'd like to be able to fork one of my own lists. Consider
this use case:

I'm a freelance web developer, for example, and there are twenty things I need
to do on every project. I could create a master list of things that need to
get done, then simply fork that list every time I start a new project, which
will inevitably have a unique set of other items to be completed.

~~~
goodside
I assumed that's what this was: git-like management of lists. As soon as I
found out the social aspect was mandatory, I tried to figure out how to close
my account and failed.

Please, people: If you don't have a way to delete accounts on your app, it's
not ready to go live.

~~~
siong1987
You can make your list private. So, it isn't pure social as you mentioned.
Email me at siong1987@gmail.com. I will delete the account for you. :)

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vineet
Looks interesting. But perhaps give a use case so that we can see where it
will be useful (in particular the forking action)?

~~~
jmtame
Thanks! The idea was started out of the desire to make travel itineraries
easy. For example, my girlfriend and I made a list of things we wanted to do
when we went to London. It was a lot of work to comb through all the various
travel sites, but we still built an itinerary together.

I think most people will share the same basic group of tourist locations (eg
the food markets, major art galleries, etc) but they'll want to do other
things uniquely interesting to them. So it'd be easy to fork a basic "London
tour guide" list and then add your own couple of items there. I think it'd be
more interesting to look over other people's lists rather than search through
a bunch of web sites with ads.

Another idea I've had is that I go shopping through the produce section of
Safeway all the time (I live in Sunnyvale, and that move-in list on the home
page is real). I have no idea what I'm doing, but I have friends who buy the
healthy stuff. I would like to see what their shopping lists look like.

~~~
medmunds
I love the simplicity.

We started with a very similar premise around collaborative list-building for
travel when we created <http://www.planapple.com>. (We're a couple years of
features and iterations into it now, so it's grown beyond simple lists in both
functionality and UI complexity.)

FWIW, we've had trouble getting any traction on public list sharing, and we've
tried a handful of different approaches. Our users are very happy to
collaborate in small groups, but that's where it ends.

Some stumbling blocks:

1\. You'll need a critical mass of really good, yet somewhat mainstream, lists
to attract people who will fork an existing list.

2\. Until you have that, you'll attract mainly people who want to build their
own lists from scratch and enjoy/are willing to put "a lot of work" into their
planning. And that's fine (it's who we're getting now) -- but that kind of
people tend to build highly-customized lists that aren't likely to appeal to
most other users.

3\. Mainstream users aren't that willing to spend effort searching through a
bunch of different lists to find one that matches their interests. (Though if
you have ideas for an algorithm that can figure out my list for London on a
backpacker's budget won't appeal to your interest in a luxury London holiday,
let me know!)

4\. In practice (for travel planning, at least), the lists tend to contain a
mixture of general-interest info plus specific details (like my hotel
confirmation number) -- which means they need filtering before they could be
made public (and people don't want to spend time on filtering).

But I definitely don't mean to discourage you -- just wanted to pass along
some of what we've learned.

Thanks for sharing.

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ragmondo
Is an open version of google schemer ?

