

Please review my Startup, AppUseful. Submit and rate your favorite apps. - utsmokingaces
http://appuseful.com

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callmeed
Decent concept and it looks good.

Here is my main concern:

How do you draw the line between _Web App_ and _Website_?

For example, I consider Weebly and Evernote to be web apps. I do not consider
Digg or Wolfram Alpha to be ... furthermore, some of your listings only partly
qualify as _Web [Anything]_. Dropbox and RescueTime both have desktop
components and Skype is truly not a web app/site in my opinion.

I'm not sure how to define it or where to draw the line–I just think you might
have more success by focusing your site on _true_ web apps (i.e. browser-based
apps or SaaS that replace/compete with desktop apps and solve a
personal/business pain point). It will solve minalecs's point of having too
many sites to filter through.

As the site is now, I probably wouldn't use it. But if it was truly an app
directory where I could say "Hey, I need to do X ... I wonder if there's a web
app" then go and find such an app ... then, yes.

~~~
utsmokingaces
Ya I agree is hard to define a webapp. If the site is useful and have
functionality other than just displaying images and content, we would consider
it.

Our goal is to make AppUseful straightforward enough to market to the
mainstream users. There are already a lot of resources that target the geek
community. About half of my friends still don't know about popular sites such
as Yelp.

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mkyc
Good idea overall. Get rid of the black application names. The are, and will
always be, a poor and often incorrect duplicate of the logo itself.

Given your content, clearly separate your ads, or use text ads only. The
change-background-on-hover effect is annoying. Use a white background since
many logos are not transparent, and white. Remove that thin gray border, it
makes the dark-background logos look messy. Your headings are not sufficiently
distinct from your website titles (just remove the site titles, which will
also keep the site from looking ugly when you have long titles). Put the
little (3) vote counter to the left of the stars. Get rid of the dropdowns for
sorting, and the buttons for pages.

When I click the logo, I expect to go to the site. I don't really care about
your detailed info - that's what (more) is for. I don't want the company's
often useless and spammy tagline, enforce a brief and useful description of
the site. I don't want to dig around in subpages for information, and I don't
want to see a screenshot of the site when I could have been looking at the
site itself.

~~~
utsmokingaces
We will get rid of the background hover effect. It was something we were just
playing with. Will consider getting the getting rid of website title
suggestion.

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sant0sk1
A site I use and love is <http://iusethis.com>. They have versions for Mac,
Windows and iPhone. Looks like your site is for web apps. You might be a good
fit into their product line...

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jack7890
I'm currently running a review-driven startup, so a couple questions related
to things we deal with:

1) Are you planning on making money with this? How? Ads probably aren't the
answer. 2) How do you keep users coming back? Once someone finds the app
they're looking for, are they likely to visit your site with any regularity?
3) What percentage of users write reviews? If you're like other review sites,
the number will be shockingly small. How can you incentivize users to review?

~~~
utsmokingaces
sure i can help with these question. Whoever interested can msg me on
<http://twitter.com/rebelvc>.

------
utsmokingaces
The HN community is very important to us. We would love to hear your feedback.
If you are a web entrepreneur, feel free to submit and write a review promote
your web app. Thanks.

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mighty
I like it, but my biggest recommendation would be to have columns (rows,
boxes, whichever) dedicated to specific categories of apps on the front page.
Right now it's a random assortment of apps and it's impossible to tell what
they do just by glancing at them--you're forced to do some hard parsing as the
app logo/name alone typically doesn't tell you anything. If you represent
categories by column, users instantly know that a whole set of apps share
something in common, and will have an easier time comparing. First-time
visitors will also get a more concrete sense of what's available on your site.

Consider Google News' front page: they divide stories into sections (World,
Business, Health, etc.) which gives users a high level overview of the content
at a glance, a domain context for headlines in a given section, and allows
them to easily ignore whole sets of stories they might not be interested in.
The iTunes App Store is the same way.

I'm also not sure how useful the Recently Added section is going to be in the
long run. The date at which an app was added to the database is less important
for users than the date at which an app launched, went out of private beta,
etc.

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mkyc
First impression, the site has a spammy feel. I think it's the light-blue
color, especially of that tag cloud on top, or perhaps it's that your logo
seems to yield too easily to the content. (See perhaps movil
.be/?s=delicious.p and www.mobi .tv/tag/m/m for comparison.) Short of messing
with it, it's hard to identify what gives this impression, but when I scroll
all the way to the bottom the contrast seems to fix things...

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greengirl512
I like the concept (unsurprising, since I write for a similar site), but I
think the site needs to be redesigned to make it more user-friendly-as other
commenters mentioned, it would be nice to be able to tell at a glance what the
app in question does.Also, the "join" button is not working on my computer
(not sure if that's intentional or not). I would also consider redefining some
of your categories and adding a little bit of written content to the main page
so that your visitors can immediately understand the benefit of visiting your
site.

Also, grammar nerd alert from the "About Us" page: "User can submit, rate, and
write reviews for web applications that they like." User should be "users."

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drp
You shouldn't include www. in the submission form. A person who is submitting
a web application probably knows what a URL should look like, and it's
possible (likely) that the app doesn't start with www. (see the URL you're
currently visiting)

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anigbrowl
Kinda neat. Name/star ratings overlap logo box border in FF 3.0.1. App
category link is well placed but maybe too small, ditto under the toolbar; my
first impression was 'bunch of random apps, how do I sort these?'

Too many featured/recent/popular; how about only 4 in each, and rotate/fade
them in and out, let me then go to the relevant page to see all recent or
whatever.

Logo/tag cloud section is a bit too big IMHO. It takes up 1/3 of the window on
my work monitor.

~~~
utsmokingaces
we will ajax the featured/recent/popular so users can scroll from left to
right.

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coopr
Get rid of the ads - you'll make the majority of your money from affiliate
fees when your site visitors sign-up for the apps you review, so why clutter
the site with ads too?

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minalecs
overall, good idea, and good execution. I can see myself coming back to use
this. My only concern would be right now the list is small, but as it grows in
size it will get harder to filter through the sites. example would be go2web20
. They have a lot of good sites, just difficult to go through them all and
find good ones.

~~~
utsmokingaces
That is definitely something we would spend a lot of time on. We are starting
to see some categories that don't fit. The tag approach of go2web20 is
confusing for the average users, we will add subcategories in the future. Our
rating system will display the higher quality apps to the users first.

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smokinn
I see a few sites like threadless that, to me at least, don't even come close
to fitting any sort of definition of "app".

Is this meant to be an open index of web apps/services? While useful now, like
minalecs pointed out, I see it quickly devolving into an index of the internet
in general if it gains traction.

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nathanburke
I like it. Reminds me a little bit of go2web20.net and usefultools.com but
it's different enough. I've been looking for sites like this so I can add a
listing for my company when we officially launch.

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chanux
Neat.

OpenID please.

