

Show HN: weekend project, Readstream - wesleyzhao
http://ReadstreamApp.com

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follower
You might want to have a demo that doesn't require signing into Twitter. I
didn't go any further.

~~~
dshipper
Thanks for your feedback, I'm sorry you didn't give the app a try.
Unfortunately we can't grab any of the headlines from your Twitter feed
without having you sign into your account so that would be a tough obstacle
for us to overcome. Eventually we may be may be able to add a feature that
shows a front page based on what is popular among all of our other users, but
for now if you would like to try it out without using your Twitter account we
have a test account that you can login with. If you're interested just send me
an email, I'd love to show you our app!

~~~
webwright
I think you're missing the point of the feedback. You need a tour, some
screenshots, or some better copy to allow interested folks to get a better
sense of what's going to happen if they become a user.

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wesleyzhao
Agree completely. After getting all this feedback we think we are going to let
users take a really cool tour of this product through the eyes of a user.

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Void_
> Watch out, you're about to be addicted.

This headline almost made me close the website. Who needs more addiction to
time-wasting than we already have?

~~~
wesleyzhao
"Almost"? Nice! We are glad you gave us a chance to prove ourselves. We will
definitely think about changing it.

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skrebbel
seconded. in addition, it feels arrogant. highlight how nice and fun it is,
not how super-special-awesome.

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dhimes
I disagree. I think the headline is just fun. Maybe s/be/become/ or some other
tweak, but I don't smell arrogance at all.

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acrum
No matter how nice the landing page, there is probably a sizable number of
people who will just close it without either 1) an interactive demo page
showing an example user's tweets, or 2) a video demo. Video demos are pretty
easy to make with tools like screenr.

Without some idea of exactly how it's used and how it will benefit me, I'm at
least a little hesitant to sign into it using my Twitter account.

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ra
Can I ask you you need permission to update my twitter stream?

That put me off trying it.

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wesleyzhao
We wanted to implement a Twitter comment system on our site much like Facebook
has - so we could foster a community around the articles. To do that, we
wanted to be able to create a box that lets you enter in your possible 'Tweet'
and click 'Tweet' to send it out. Also we wanted to let you RT from our app!

~~~
wesleyzhao
Yeah the commenting system the way it works right now, goes through the json
array once to see if there are any @replies, and to find which were RT's were
a hassle because we would have to do a bunch of string comparisons (since
Twitter's search API doesn't return the relevant data). So we were thinking
right now to both keep the data loading as fast as possible and keep our API
calls limited, we would leave them in but throw them at the bottom of the
comments.

~~~
wesleyzhao
@revorad nice! We use chartbeat so we should have thought of using backtype
(their Twitter stream app of choice). Definitely will see how well that fits
into our next iteration.

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deno
So, content creators convert their RSS feeds to Twitter feeds and Readstream
then converts them back again? Seems pointless. Why not just use the full feed
in the first place (if that's what you want, instead of the <140 chars
synopsis)?

I don't mean to sound cynical, but surely, I must have missed something.

~~~
medwezys
well if you follow RSS on twitter it is your problem. If you follow people who
share links, than it is a way better than RSS, because human filter is applied
and you are more likely to get an interesting content.

~~~
deno
My friends and I did that in 2005 with Google Reader.

But fair enough, the project looks nice. I'd only suggest to implement caching
better:

1) Make /get_user_feed.php return only list of stories. E.g.
[<http://.../story1>, <http://.../story2>]

2) Fetch stories one-by-one using unique links, set proper caching headers

You could also use pro.embed.ly

~~~
wesleyzhao
Nice suggestion - definitely (if implemented) will really help with our SEO.
The thing I guess that may be a barrier is actually switching the page and
keeping a javascript array or knowing where the user is (guess we can do that
via the DB though).

------
dshipper
Pro tip: You can navigate through the articles using the arrow keys on your
keyboard. Do you guys have any suggestions as to how to make this more clear?
(We already say to do so on the loading screen but feel not many people pick
up on it)

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revorad
Just keep displaying a small "use arrow keys to navigate" on top of the
article.

When a user first logs in, show some interesting article already instead of
just the "your content is loading" message.

~~~
dshipper
Interesting. We were thinking about popping up a lightbox for a new user to
remind them if they didn't use the keys. Do you think that would be too
intrusive?

We definitely considered doing that, the biggest question that we ran into was
how to select the article. We thought we could get something random from the
database, calculate it based on what your friends are interested in, or
calculate it based on what's trending overall. Because we have been coding for
a long time (it's 7 AM and we've been up all night for the 3rd straight night)
we just decided to leave it with some instructions and worry about how to do
that later. We'll definitely get on it right now, it's a great suggestion.

~~~
revorad
I hate lightboxes. I think dialog boxes are the worst part of desktop apps
that we have imported to web apps.

How to select an article? Just choose one you like. An old one from the best
of HN? Or something from here - <http://longreads.com>.

Don't overengineer.

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dhimes
One comment on UX: After clicking "get started" I'm presented with a way to
enter my email and password. It may save people a moment's confusion if you
say something like

"sign in to twitter: twitter username or email

twitter password"

Although it's clear what you are doing once you see the URL and if you read
carefully- but in that first millisecond I'm thinking you want me to sign into
an account for _your_ service (which I don't have).

Of course, you could always have the user create an account with you and have
the wiring to their twitter account on the backend, but that would require
more trust on the user's part.

~~~
ajaymehta
I see the concern here - as the app is pretty simple right now, we're just
using Twitter. We plan to bring in other sources and more personalization, so
we'll definitely have Readstream accounts in the near future. But for now,
Twitter makes it easy :)

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yolesaber
Although I can't see it as a total replacement for my twitter stream, it
definitely is a neat app and I will be using it. However, it would be really
cool if you also could parse the links in the articles. For instance, this
News Desk piece from the New Yorker
([http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/to-
do...](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2011/04/to-do-list-
winners-and-warnings.html)) has a lot of links and references, but they do not
appear in the read stream.

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tehwalrus
This sounds awesome, but it would be good if I could try it without giving
your app unlimited access to my twitter account forever. (much as @ra has
pointed out.) Is there scope/resource for a demo version without the API
features (i.e. just grabbing my timeline and showing me the links inside your
UI, with retweet buttons greyed out)?

I appreciate that is a fairly convoluted feature to add in 3 days though -
sounds like you guys did a good job anyway! :)

~~~
wesleyzhao
Hey! So the Twitter API actually does not let you 'mimic' that you are viewing
someone else's timeline other than the 'authenticated user'. When we found out
about this we were pretty bummed too.

However, we did like the idea of maybe not being logged on and just surfing
through Nytimes feed, or ESPN, or whomever. This IS possible and would be
cool/useful we think.

~~~
mootothemax
Maybe a quick hack would be a link to view what one of your developer's
accounts sees when he or she logs in? That'll give an example of what's
addictive without requiring a full user signin :-)

~~~
ajaymehta
Great idea - a simulation would be the best way of understanding the service
without any privacy concerns on the user's part.

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glesperance
Its nice to see that other teams are currently working to solve the noise vs
signal problem by using people to curate content in a more _networked_ way.

Also, pardon my curiosity, but is that the idea with which you applied to YC
or did you come up with it for the interview ?

In any cases, good luck w/ your interview ; there is sure a lot of future in
that type of apps!

~~~
wesleyzhao
Thanks for the compliment! This is actually not the idea we applied with. This
is something we hope will WOW the panel (hopefully one of them is reading this
right now...)

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kpanghmc
Interesting project. I agree with the others who say you definitely need some
sort of demo to convince users to sign up.

Question though: how did you guys get around the copyright issues? It sounds
like you're grabbing the content from these links and displaying them in their
entirety on your page. Won't the content providers complain about this?

~~~
kloncks
Many of the sources I saw being pulled out were freely available on the
sources' RSS feeds

~~~
kpanghmc
Right, but content providers at least have some control over their RSS feeds
(e.g. adding advertising or truncating it to the first X characters of the
article to force users to click to read more).

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sathyabhat
Can you guys consider adding a bug tracker or any place where you can accept
feedback (uservoice?).

Just wanted to give you folks a heads up about escape characters coming near
quotes. <http://i.imgur.com/pKWEK.png>

Congrats on the project, love it.

~~~
wesleyzhao
GR! Dang addslashes().... We should have something set up that does allow bug
submissions... but until then feel free to email me if you see anything else
wesley.zhao@gmail.com

------
EGF
This is great. I had a feeling what it would do from the description and the
name and it lived out to that promise. I think its a great start for a
"weekend" project and would love to see where it goes and give some product
feedback if you are up for it. Will try to contact you directly.

~~~
ajaymehta
Hey, thanks so much! We had a personal need for a product like this, and we
thought others would too. I'm glad you're finding it to be useful. :)

------
andr
As a techie, I'd be more convinced if I read a few words on how you determine
relevancy. You don't need to reveal your secret sauce, but you need to
convince me it's good enough so that I don't need to look at Twitter anymore.

~~~
ajaymehta
Our premise is that Twitter is an amazing place to get human-filtered,
socially-relevant content but there's a lot of noise. As of right now, our
articles are just listed in reverse chronological order by tweet time, so
there's not too much of a relevancy engine in place. However, we want the app
to be as relevant as possible.

Basically, we don't have much relevancy secret sauce yet - but we're looking
to develop some soon. :)

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joshbaptiste
Seen this post late, currently receiving a "Fatal error: Uncaught exception
'EpiOAuthException'" with a PHP stack trace, really should hide errors like
this from being displayed on the webpage.

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sammville
Nice work guys.. Consider showing the headlines in reverse order, with the
newest ones being at the top and older ones at the bottom so i don't have to
scroll to get the latest headlines.

~~~
dshipper
Hey sammville thanks for your feedback! Right now we're showing the tweets in
reverse chronological order by tweet time, but that doesn't take into account
when the article was actually published. We'll definitely take a look and see
if we can take publishing time into account, but that might be difficult given
the host of different places that we are pulling content from.

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revorad
This is really nicely done. Can you tell us how you built it?

~~~
dshipper
First we pull as much of your Twitter timeline as we can, and find the ones
that have links in them. We used an open source project called Goose to grab
the article text from those links and store it in our database and then push
it to the user. It's all PHP/MySQL/Javascript/Java running on a VPS. It took
us about 3 days of work to go from idea to completion (in between class as
we're college students.) Feel free to email us or comment if you have any more
questions :)

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cao825
Doesn't work for me. Site keeps getting connection resets.

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arturadib
How do you guys sort articles? By date? Popularity?

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ajaymehta
As of right now the articles are just sorted in reverse chronological order by
tweet time. We definitely want to make the sorting more personalized and
relevant, so we're 100% open to ideas on how to do that. Have any good ones?
:)

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arunkk
Good tool to use. I like it

~~~
dshipper
Thanks!

