

Ask HN: Showing off customer feedback useful to you? (new from YC 07) - robfitz
http://www.habitstream.com

======
robfitz
Hey guys, we've been working with London's agencies for the last few months to
develop Habit Stream, which help find the nice things people are saying about
your business and then re-broadcast the best bits (customer tweets, press
coverage, Amazon reviews, etc) through more scalable channels (like widgets &
ads).

We've been getting a strong response from the agency side, but we're just
starting to learn how we can best help startups, blogs, and small businesses.
Basically, we think everyone should be able to benefit from the unsolicited
testimonials that are popping up all over the web.

So, we would really love to hear your thoughts. It's all self-serve and
there's a free trial. Thanks!

PS. You may have previously seen us as Minivid and/or Fuzzwich. Stream is a
totally different approach to solving the same problem of making social
advertising easier & more effective.

~~~
gridspy
I'm interested in using Habitstream for Gridspy. It is quite a big price step
between free, branded streams and unbranded commercial streams.

It is a cool idea, something that I'll have to come back an explore as we
start to take off.

~~~
savrajsingh
We're already using it at Wattvision (<http://www.wattvision.com/info/about>),
and it's pretty cool. Feature suggestion: send me email reminders to approve
new stream items. That would be a great feature. Like, "hey, you had 400 new
mentions in the last week -- and here are some positive sounding ones. Click
here to approve."

------
jeff18
I gave this an honest try because the video looked awesome, but sadly it is
not useful to me.

I basically just got a list of thousands of retweets for blog posts and a
bunch of Disqus comments. Despite combing through many pages, I seriously
could not find a single appropriate testimonial.

Maybe you could add Google Checkout support? For example:
[https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?...](https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?allowEmptyReviews=true&sellerId=204250837318315&s=All&q=&sortBy=Rating&isIncr=false)
I have a really low volume of Google Checkout orders, but even that is a gold
mine for testimonials.

Send me a message if you'd like some more info on my experience:
jeff@wolfire.com

~~~
seekely
Thanks for the feedback. For many searches, there is a lot of noise and very
little signal. This is a big usability problem. As we progress the product, we
want to get really good at identifying the signal and filter out the thousands
of duplicate and irrelevant comments (as you unfortunately stumbled upon).

The best searches for smaller companies right now will be those with unique
names or those using a direct Amazon/YouTube/Rss URL, which is obviously not
helpful for everybody.

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Google Checkout Reviews. I'll see
if I can get that added by early next week and let you know.

------
wheels
Design nitpick:

Don't use fixed size containers and variable sized fonts:

[http://skitch.com/scotchi/ns2be/habit-stream-curate-
broadcas...](http://skitch.com/scotchi/ns2be/habit-stream-curate-broadcast-
your-brands-social-media-conversation)

~~~
hailpixel
Thanks for the screenshot. We'll clean it up.

------
jasonlbaptiste
this is really really smart and a potentially big market. any smart site
(ecommerce or whatever) has testimonials. the problem is, they're fairly
static and people see them as possibly unsubstantiated. if i tweet "I <3 my
iPhone" and its linked on your site, you cant ignore that. throw in the other
sources too.

~~~
robfitz
Hey Jason, thanks. Totally agree. I think there's also a certain value in the
knowledge that the testimonials were unsolicited - just freely given to a
friend in a normal conversation.

------
jasonkester
Cool, but I suspect we're not your audience.

It would be hard to imagine your API being simultaneously simple enough to be
less work using Twitter's API manually, and customizable enough to dump out
exactly what I want easier than massaging the data and presenting it myself.

But then if I was a guy in a band setting up our website, I could see this
being really useful.

~~~
seekely
To somebody just using Tweets (keep in mind that we currently also pull from
Amazon, YouTube, Blogs, Blog comments and any RSS/Atom feed), we provide an
extra safety net with our moderation. If you just incorporate the Twitter api
directly on your site, you have to accept whatever users say showing up. With
our moderation in between, you run no risk of the random or ugly comments
showing up on your site.

Also, if you do to use more than just Tweets, our API returns normalized data
so you have a consistent and reliable set of fields no matter the source.

You can see an example of results from our API here:
[http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d...](http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d162e1a2eff97facce32f&method=stream.stream.getContent&id=149&broadcastId=3)

If you look closely at any of the Tweets in the set, all the data you can get
from the Twitter api is still there.

~~~
jasonkester
I found it strange that you don't pull from blogs themselves. We have our own
"what people are saying about our thing" page, and it's entirely populated
with blog content.

If TechCrunch wrote up my app, it seems the only way I'd know about it from
your service would be if somebody mentioned the app name in the comments.

What's the motivation there?

~~~
seekely
We search both blog content and blog comments, so if a TechCrunch article or
TechCrunch comment mentions you, there is a good chance it will show up in the
dashboard. Given the volume of tweets versus blog comments versus blog
content, the blog content is usually more buried and has to be filtered out
with the radio buttons provided when browsing a Stream.

Admittedly, we are not running our own crawlers right now, so it's hard for us
to direct searching at older content or specific sites/blogs. We currently use
Backtype (<http://www.backtype.com>) and ContextVoice
(<http://www.contextvoice.com>) for finding blog comments and blog content
respectively.

Our end goal is to find and rank social media content in real time. If
somebody as prominent as TechCrunch mentions you, we would like you to know
immediately and have that piece of content displayed, noticeable and ready for
your approval in our dashboard within minutes.

We are not there yet and it sucks when we completely miss important mentions,
but I promise we are working our damnedest to get better.

------
revorad
Hey that looks neat. How did you make that video?

~~~
hailpixel
Thanks! We actually made it ourselves, believe it or not. Some screen shots
and drawings mixed with After Effects.

~~~
staunch
I want a product that lets me create videos like that on the web in 20
minutes.

~~~
revorad
Exactly my thought!

~~~
staunch
Found this today (off TC) <http://www.xtranormal.com/>

Kinda what I was thinking.

------
SlyShy
It's weird to me that you aren't using your own product on your website. Or if
you are, I looked around for it for a long time and didn't find it.

You don't think it would be a natural fit for your own start-up? ;-) You could
display all the positive comments you are getting on your website, and updated
in real time!

~~~
robfitz
In short: Yes, it's weird, but there's a good reason! ;)

We're integrating realtime content pretty deeply into our site. It's a full
redesign and we're still in the midst of the makeover. In the meantime, we
wanted to start getting feedback from the community earlier rather than later.

(edited for clarity)

~~~
PStamatiou
Rob is this your next startup? I ran into one of the fuzzwich guys last week
at Startup Riot (forgot his name).

~~~
robfitz
Hey Paul. Same company, same team (<http://habitindustries.com/about>), and
still trying to make social advertising easier. It's been a winding (&
interesting) journey of customer development from Fuzzwich to Habit Stream,
which I'll probably post details of later this week.

------
thinkbohemian
Widgets, ad units, and stream API: should be clickable links IMHO, they look
like buttons, and are what i was interested in immediately

