
Trunk.ly Keeps Track of the Links You Share Online - robryan
http://www.nytimes.com/external/gigaom/2011/01/18/18gigaom-trunkly-keeps-track-of-the-links-you-share-online-58012.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
======
alexdong
Thanks folks. Trunk.ly was launched 33 days ago right here on HN. Here is the
original link when we announced that:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014567>

There are still tons of works need to be done. Our viral co-efficient is too
low, new user orientation process is horribly missing. But it's been a great
ride so far.

we're currently seeking angel investment - if you like what we've achieved so
far and are interested in finding out more, then contact us at tim@trunk.ly
and we'd love to share our plans and goals and see if we can work together.

~~~
nc17
One problem is that you log in and you have nothing to look at. You really
want to have something for new users to get a great "out of the box"
experience and they'll be more motivated to come back.

~~~
tbull007
Totally agree - we're rethinking that first experience at the moment so that
you go through a more guided process. The intent is to send you to connect
your social networks, then fill out your profile, then send you to the home
screen. With a priority queue for new users, we should be able to get you to a
home page that is full of your links by the time you first see it.

~~~
bootload
On a lot of services you are automatically followed by the founders, like
greeters at the door of a party. One idea could be to either seed some initial
links (via suggested users) or add some top links (links with high frequency)
from either yourself or Alex.

~~~
tbull007
We threw the greeters idea away mostly because we selfishly want to choose who
we follow on Trunk.ly because we find it really useful. If we follow everyone
we'd have to have some other account that we 'really' use.

Seeding the links is a good idea - maybe we'll make new users automatically
follow us which would achieve that goal and means they have some links in
their Timeline.

~~~
bootload
_"... If we follow everyone we'd have to have some other account that we
'really' use. ..."_

Yeah, good point.

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mattdeboard
I am glad to see Trunk.ly get this kind of attention.

I contacted Alex and Tim last month to see if there was anything that I as a
novice programmer could do to help them with their suddenly overwhelming
workload. I was seeking just a little bit of work as a learning exercise, and
these guys asked me to write an RSS connector for them. It was the most
effective learning experience I've had, ever.

I am very happy for these guys. Two class acts who gave me the chance to
actually get some code put into production. (AFAIK they're still using the RSS
connector I wrote, with some adaptations and what have you I didn't know to
include.) Kudos, guys.

~~~
tbull007
Hey Matt, thanks for the kind words. We really appreciated the work you did,
and yes, that RSS connector is still there.

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tomsuchy
Excellent app, imported my delicious bookmarks, set up twitter/fb feeds, works
like a dream.

The only thing that would make the experience complete would be tag
suggestions based on previously entered tags in the bookmarklet popup (you
know, type a few letters, get a list of tags). Or maybe a list of all tags, I
don't know, a simple alpha-sorted block of tags.

Even if you don't do any of those, I would still use it though :)

Great stuff! -Tom

~~~
tbull007
Thanks Tom, there's a lot of work still to go - we'll make sure these things
are on the list.

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StavrosK
How do you get mentioned in the NYT, if I may ask?

~~~
tbull007
The short answer, I submitted a press release to GigaOm, they wrote an article
based on that and the NYT syndicate their content.

The long answer, I'm not a PR professional, but what's been working for us is
to find some headline hook.

I'm not trying to write the article for the journalist but to pull out what's
interesting. If it's an Australian blog, I'd make a big deal of the fact we
are Melbourne based 'Aussie battler hits Top 20K sites globally in first
month'. If it's someone like GigaOm, I'm trying to find some other 'cut
through' that will grab the journalists attention.

I think in this case, the headline I went with was 'New startup Trunk.ly
bookmarks 5 million links for users in its first month'.

The press release itself was basically the same regardless - a story about how
we launched, what we do in the first paragraph, then facts figures and quotes.
Overall I try to tell a story, but I make sure there is plenty of quotable
things too.

In practice this seems to of been working OK - what's interesting is that the
quotes facts and figures rarely, if ever, get used, but I think what's going
on here is that we are capturing the blogger /journalists interest enough to
want to research more and write about us.

I never tried to pitch the NYT, I think pitching a tech blog is a lot easier.

The question I'd love to know the answer to is do the NYT curate inbound
syndication - did some sub-editor somewhere make a decision to run the
article, or was it purely automatic?

~~~
bootload
_"... The question I'd love to know the answer to is do the NYT curate inbound
syndication - did some sub-editor somewhere make a decision to run the
article, or was it purely automatic? ..."_

Follow the flow of information. Who is the original author? Where was the
piece originally published? Well the author is Simon Mackie from GigaOam. The
piece was published in the _"collaboration"_ section ~
<http://gigaom.com/collaboration/> an area of reader interest that gigaom has
a separate category for. If we look a bit closer at the author we and we check
his bio, I noticed Simon did a stint at SitePoint ~
<http://www.sitepoint.com/about/> Now I know that's a Melbourne company
because I worked with Daks (Mark Harbottle) in a previous startup. I guess you
should ask the author about the jump to the NYT ~
<http://twitter.com/spiky_simon>

The point is, the product is in a growth category and the author knows the
startup scene in Melbourne. So is it a case of luck? or making your own luck?
I think the later is the case.

------
cj
If anyone is looking for a simpler bookmarking app, I made
<http://saaave.com/> last weekend.

Bookmarks are added with a one-click bookmarklet that saves your current URL.
No tagging or further action necessary. The app indexes the content of your
bookmarks for fulltext searching.

It's lacking a UI, but feel free to give it a try :)

~~~
pacifika
Great. doesn't even need much UI. Not sure how you will scale indexing with
more users - so if I could install it on my own server and and you add
addons/plugins (get 1 free with every account) as extra payable features
(imports etc) while keeping this bare bones install free then that would work
for me.

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didip
I just registered, that's a clever way of collecting user links, through
scraping status update.

It seems like the bookmarking scene is getting crowded again.

PS: I run a dead simple bookmarking app too - <http://mybucket.co>

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gnubardt
This is great! Is an HN importer coming :)

~~~
tbull007
We were actually going to launch with HN importer but didn't quite get there.
If we find some time, it would be a bit of fun to implement.

