

 Review my new site : 48ers - Realtime Social Search - whyleym
http://48ers.com

======
whyleym
Hacker News is my favourite site on the internet and having been a member for
almost 4 years I've learnt a lot from everyone here. My co-founders and I
couldn't think of a better place to launch our new site and get valuable
feedback from a group of people we respect.

48ers allows realtime searching of a number of social networks - we created
the site to scratch our own itch - to track what people are saying about other
websites we own. We hope it might be useful for brands too.

Feel free to give it a go at <http://www.48ers.com> or jump straight into a
search:

<http://48ers.com/search/?q=hacker+news>

<http://48ers.com/search/?q=airbnb>

<http://48ers.com/search/?q=balsamiq>

<http://48ers.com/search/?q=mark+zuckerberg>

Please comment here and tell us about:

* What you like

* What you dislike

* Any bugs you find

* Where you'd like to see this go in future (we have some ideas but would love to hear yours)

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jrussbowman
I'm working on something similar with www.unscatter.com, though you and I are
taking different approaches on clutter vs providing more context.

Likes: \- Layout and design. I wish I had a better knack for that kind of
thing. 48ers is a lot of what I was going for and still haven't reached as for
a minimalistic approach that's also appealing the to eye. \- The "Getting
results" javascript is a real nice usability touch. Nice enough that honestly,
would you mind if I implemented something similar when I get back to working
on my own site? I prefer not to blatantly steal :)

Suggestions: \- It's a little slow. Not sure what your backend is, hopefully
you're using something that allows you to submit all your requests at once and
handle each as a callback. If you are, I would suggest benchmarking your
requests to figure out which are your slowest ones and making sure you make
those first. I shaved 10-30ms per uncached request by making my request to
Facebook the first request I launched rather than the last, as it was the
slowest API to respond.

\- Are you caching results? I did a search for "Epic 4g" (as I want to know
when it will be coming out) and then immediately hit search again and it took
a bit for that next request to load. I would really suggest you cache at least
the data (as I'm doing) if not the entire results page (as I will probably
move to with nginx caching modules) for x seconds/minutes and it will save you
bandwidth costs, especially for those trending topics which may get a lot of
concurrent hits if you app ever scales to appreciable traffic.

Only question I really have is do you have a plan for advertising other than
Adsense? Adsense is going to have a hard time matching ads for search result
pages.

~~~
whyleym
Thanks for taking time out to comment.

As you say Unscatter seems a similar idea and we can see where you're coming
from re: context.

We hear you on the speed - this is what we are trying to focus on - make this
a super quick, great user experience. You're right in that caching is the way
to go - again it's one of those release early and iterate items. We don't
presently do any caching as such so this is no doubt something we will iterate
on.

In terms of monetisation - for the first few months we are looking at adsense
to get a feel for how contextual the ads are and what the relative click
through rates will be. After this we have some ideas that we hope will work
out well.

------
rksprst
Can you explain a bit more about how you actually get this data in real time?
Are you scrapping these sites? Doing REST calls every x seconds. Or using the
streaming API for twitter?

Are you storing any of this data persistently? Can I do historic searches on
any term, or just something that was indexed before?

Are you planning on adding any sentiment analysis? Or any other analytics on
the data, assuming you are storing it.

Do you have an API or plan to support an API down the road. What's your
monetization plan?

~~~
whyleym
Presently we are using the various API's that are available for each of the
services that we are linking into. We have some custom code which interogates
this data and renders it to the user. In respect of historic searches and
storing of the data, storing data is not something we are doing from day 1,
however this is something we are certainly looking longer term. In terms of
historic searches - again day 1, we search back as long as the various API's
allow.

Sentiment Analysis is something we looked at, however at the moment we wanted
to keep things stripped back - that's not to say we may not offer this in
future as an advanced search feature or even a feature that users can turn
on/off.

API's are on the agenda and these are actively being developed to allow others
to call into the service. In terms of monetisation we are starting out with a
contextual ad model (using Google Adsense to start) - which obviously hasn't
worked out too bad for Google, however longer term we have some other ideas
around this.

------
earle
I'm not sure what this does differently from every other search engine, or
search engine aggregator?

Aggregating results via third party APIs is a neat, although old, stunt -- but
doesn't exactly translate into a startup business to compete with search
engines.

~~~
whyleym
Our aim was to provide something that was uncluttered, simple and fast which
(eventually) covers as many social network and real people's views of either
what people are saying about your brand or whatever you wish to search on in
realtime.

We ourselves use this daily as a tool to track what people are saying about
our other web properties.

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kktom
If I search for a hash tag I would prefer to only get stuff that actually has
that hash tag in it. For example, searching for #mac return lots of tweets
about mac and cheese, which isn't all that useful.

~~~
whyleym
Yep - we agree - we'll have a look into this

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davecardwell
Have you considered adding RSS feeds on the search result pages, or would this
not fit in with your eventual business model? It would certainly make me use
the service at any rate.

~~~
whyleym
It's funny you should say that - this is a feature that is high on the to be
developed list. We are trying to take the release, iterate often approach - so
hopefully this feature will be in soon. Thanks for the comment - any other
suggestions ?

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eegilbert
I would refine the phrase "social search." To me, it means searching alongside
other people with similar goals, rather than an all-in-one site for social
media search.

~~~
whyleym
It is our intention to be an all-in-one social media search. If 'social
search' does not portray this have you any thoughts on what a good tagline
would be to meet our aim - any suggestions more than welcome. Thanks

------
ether
Can you enlighten me on how you plan to differentiate yourselves from the
existing real-time search engines like collecta, oneriot, etc.?

~~~
whyleym
Thanks for taking time out to comment.

Collecta albeit a good service we felt was a little cluttered and on occasion
a little sluggish - our service's aim is to be decluttered, simple, fast
social search. With regards OneRiot - they are more of a full featured
offering where we intend to focus more on the core search function presented
back to users in an uncluttered easy to read manner.

------
gibbo
[Removed in the interest of responsible disclosure]

~~~
whyleym
Thanks - we'll take a look into that

