

Show HN: TOP.ST – Get the news before it starts trending - vadimbaryshev
https://top.st

======
vadimbaryshev
Hello HN,

I created trending news aggregation service called TOP.ST. Ratings are based
on people's social network activity and updates in real-time. At the moment
the service works in 29 countries. More countries are coming in future. In
next updates I planning to add news categories and thinking about e-mail
digest.

I'm looking for a feedback. Feel free to ask me any questions here or by
e-mail: mail@top.st

~~~
blfr
It looks good and seems to capture the vibe of the moment well.

Any details on how it works? Which networks do you monitor? Is it just
Twitter? How do you know where people are from? Do you go by language? Only
take into account tweets with geo information?

~~~
mmahemoff
Not OP but I'll hazard a guess it looks for URLs which appear at an
accelerating rate on Twitter, using a whitelist of domain sources (since we
see several frequent domains).

One feedback is I'd avoid the animation effect until the user has been idle
for a few seconds.

~~~
vadimbaryshev
Excellent idea about waiting for idle to update ratings. I thought a lot about
how to prevent changes while user scrolling the list. At this moment user have
a pause button, to do it manually, but your suggestion looks more useful.
Thanks!

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x5n1
Just made me think about how much time I could waste reading utterly useless
information. News, never again!

Good concept though and good execution.

~~~
edc117
Not to be snarky, but isn't that what you're doing on HN? ;)

~~~
x5n1
Most stuff here is not useless.

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el33th4xx0r
Rather than currently or soon-to-be trending, is there any application/website
that compile last week or month trends?

I'm not interested in knowing whats trending today, but I don't want to be
completely out of the loop either.

~~~
wordlink
[http://wordlink.com/monthly](http://wordlink.com/monthly)
[http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup](http://wordlink.com/monthly/startup)
[http://wordlink.com/weekly](http://wordlink.com/weekly) (Front page is daily)

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nemmonszz
This is pretty cool. The one thing that i noticed is that there are a lot of
'duplicates', in the sense of one event being covered by a ton of different
websites and then being shown multiple times.

I'm wondering if would be possible to use some sort of string pattern matching
algorithm (perhaps bolstered by comparing article submission times?) to group
'like' stories together to mitigate this effect, perhaps allowing a the user
to expand a given group to see all of the stories pertaining to that 'event'
in order of popularity.

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ch215
Bookmarked. This is a great website, simple design well executed, but I'll
give you my gripes, too.

First thing I'd do? Get rid of the blurred background for readability's sake,
it makes me feel like I've got glaucoma.

Also, I whitelist scripts and I'm oddly outraged when I land on a page which
hardly functions without. At least tell me I have to enable JS. It's a minor
thing but first impressions and all.

I'm intrinsically uncomfortable with websites moving without my say so but it
may grow on me in this case (just don't over do it ;).

The only other thing that's grinding my gears is more general and
counterintuitive. Namely, news being weighted toward what people want to read,
rather than need to read.

However, I'm probably just being an idealist... after all, who doesn't need to
see a raccoon riding an alligator?

Edit: Just found the pause button, it's a good compromise.

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317070
In Belgium here, and somehow the website figured out I speak dutch (which is
quite correct) and used i18n which I presume is written by a Frenchman
studying medieval Dutch. So maybe allow me to switch to English i18n, like I
always do, or look for a better translator for dutch.

Right now, the logo for example has 4 words and 2 grammar mistakes. So the use
of dutch i18n is really bad if you want more users in the Netherlands.

Just a heads up. Looks very interesting otherwise, might use it as my landing
page. I'm that kind of news-junkie.

~~~
vadimbaryshev1
Thanks for your suggestion. I temporary switched all locales to english.

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niico
Very interesting! My only (design) suggestion: The H1 title looks like a logo.
I'd add a logo there and move the H1 to somewhere more visible (At least for
the first few months of the site)

Funny, a couple weeks ago we launched our Chrome extension that sends you a
notification every time there is a top story on HN also called TOP.
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9612653))
:D

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wordlink
We built this 2 years ago and applied to Ycomb with no luck both years.
Everyone we have uses it everyday but it's difficult to penetrate the
publishing market. Still we work with large marketing firms to offer
intelligence services. Full text searchable
[http://wordlink.com](http://wordlink.com) and
[http://analytics.wordlink.com](http://analytics.wordlink.com)

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yoha
Two short remarks:

* it would be nice to have a static <noscript> version, or at least a message asking to enable Javascript, rather that seeing the templates

* I was going to make a remark on the automatic updates, but I finally spotted the "pause "button; maybe make it a little more obvious?

Otherwise, the website looks really fast and neat and the country filter is
very handy!

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oconnore
What is the value in being so current? Unless you are doing HFT or disaster
response, you probably want to get your news distilled, curated, in batch
form, and aggregated over some time.

Where is the Sunday paper of the internet?

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nathcd
Looks cool. My one gripe: it looks like there's a footer when I switch between
time intervals, but it's impossible to get to since the stories continue
loading as I scroll down.

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vadimbaryshev1
Thanks all for your replies. It's really very helpful. Unfortunately HN says
that I commenting too fast. But I promise, that I reply for all questions as
soon as possible.

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pierre_massat
Very cool. I like how you update the list. Page up/down doesn't seem to work
though.

Edit: my bad, my focus was still on the country dropdown.

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Allvitende
Good stuff. Been looking for something like this for a while. You plugging
into all their APIs or are you scraping?

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Campbellb
Is there an API available/in the works so people can play with this data?

~~~
iqonik
I would use and pay for API access too.

~~~
iqonik
A POST request to [https://top.st/top/1/GB](https://top.st/top/1/GB) is good
enough for my needs. Can you email me commercials if you would allow me to do
so (email in my profile).

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dang
Sockpuppet votes and comments are not allowed on Hacker News.

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clusterfoo
this is great! -- would be nice to add categories / filters.

Also interesting if each story had a 'stats' page with some numbers so it's
not so much a black box.

~~~
vadimbaryshev
Categories will be added in a few weeks. And each link will be have a chart
with historyc data.

