

Ask HN: Rate my Startup www.birdpie.com (Updated) - railsbob
http://www.birdpie.com/railsbob

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coffeemug
The first (and biggest) problem is that when I land on the home page I have no
idea what the service is supposed to do.

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railsbob
Hi coffeemug, that was a mistake. We have corrected about page with the
introduction now.

~~~
run4yourlives
I think he means that the first sentence on the about page should actually be
on the front page.

I felt the same. The worst part was that I actually think your product is
useful, even though I'm not a twitter user.

Don't hide your best selling point on some other page!

~~~
vaporstun
I think this was an accident. The true homepage to this site is:
<http://www.birdpie.com/> and the submitted link is
<http://www.birdpie.com/railsbob> which points to a user's page. The only way
to truly fix this submission would be to edit the URL.

~~~
run4yourlives
ah sorry.

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railsbob
I always wondered when I saw 'Tweet This' button on popular blogs for sharing
bookmarks and links. However there was no easy way to go back and
search/manage the bookmarks tweeted by you. We have developed an application
www.birdpie.com which stores all of the URLs (Web Links) you have entered on
Twitter as bookmarks, so you can refer to them at a later date. The
application takes care of minified urls to avoid duplication and pulls
information from the url to auto-tag and assign a proper title. Some features
are pending (like search bookmarks with keywords, etc) but they will be pushed
soon.

I'd love to have feedback on its features, appearance or improvements.

Thanks!

~~~
indiejade
In general, I really like the look (CSS3 + HTML5 = Awesome!), but maybe you
should have linked to the "about" page, which is a wee bit more explanatory
than the demo of your links. It takes a minute to figure out that "slices" and
"bites" are a play on the "pie" aspect of the name . . . maybe change the logo
to birdPIE to make it a little more intuitive, or perhaps include a pie-like
spatula or a fork icon beside the links for people to "get" the lingo.

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mikeryan
On first hit I had no idea what it was. I thought some sort of
digg/reddit/hackernews dealio

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mikeryan
I should note for other "Rate my site" people.

This is singularly the most common issue I face with new sites. If its brand
new explain what it does a bit somewhere near the top of the page. (Even a
"What is birdpie?" link on the top of the page works for me)

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djb_hackernews
Startup? No. Webapp? Probably.

Looks like more of an exercise in ui design than actual functionality, which
isn't a bad thing.

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natch
I dunno. What do you have against putting a blurb on your home page that tells
what the site is for?

[update: Oh, it's not the home page. But still, I can't tell what this is for,
and I should be able to, even on a sub-page.

'Slices' - what? I have been thinking about Slicehost lately, and the first
link mentions Ruby, which I don't know. So when I land on this link you have
me thinking that maybe the site is a way for Ruby users to manage their slices
on Slicehost.

The About page should definitely tell what the site is about. And the help
pages are not loading for me.

If you want to do a tweeted-link application, you should add a bit more value
- maybe have thumbnails of the destination site, or expand bit.ly/etc. URLs
(while keeping the bit.ly one too).

If someone uses bit.ly to shorten every URL they tweet, bit.ly stores the URLs
for them already, so...]

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mshafrir
The site uses jargon that isn't clear. What are bites? Slices?

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bgriggs1
The golden rule of UI: never sacrifice usability. Those fonts might look
interesting and add to the overall aesthetic, but the smaller versions are
virtually unreadable on my machine.

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peteysd
I like the site design. Simple and clean. I agree with the other poster that
commented that some of the jargon was misleading.

Some of the information on the Help page should probably be made more
prominent.

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johnrob
First thoughts: Looks like digg.com, calling votes 'bites' instead of 'diggs'.
Oh, and there are 'slices' too...

After reading the help menu, I understand that tweeted bookmarks are the
things in the list (aka 'slice'?).

I think the most important feedback I can give is to either include more help
on the landing page (what are bites and slices?), or change the terms to be
more obvious at first glance.

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megamark16
It doesn't show up very well in Chrome (at least, it looks a little fuzzy to
me), but fine in Firefox. Seems like a pretty cool tool.

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Raphael
You need a denser UI. I can only see 4 bookmarks on the screen at a time.
Raise that to at least 10.

Categories and tags are redundant. Remove categories. I like the automatic
tagging, but I may want to manually edit them sometimes.

Link to Twitter.com's profiles and tweets. Re-tweet buttons would make sense.

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warp
From the landing page I have no idea what the site is about, so I click
'About'... and I still have no idea. From the <title> tag I can see this isn't
something for which I am the target audience. Seems odd to not have that
somewhere on the page.

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yosho
the site seems to have errors now... or is it just me?

~~~
railsbob
Sorry, we redeployed it just now with corrected content on 'About' Page.

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traisav
An amazing website - great design and easy to use. Incredibly helpful. Thanks
Dynamic50!

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axod
really good design, but I have no idea why it would be useful.

~~~
vnorby
Design is nice, but the UI/information architecture is confusing - lot of
information that I don't understand, and the nomenclature is awkward. I would
suggest showing less information, i.e. you don't need to show who submitted
the links on every "slice," considering that all the slices on a page are
inherently connected to one person. I think you could get rid of the "see
original tweet" text as well, and maybe just show the bird somewhere if you
really need that feature (although I think it can be removed).

