

Show HN: You Write. We Quantify – thoughtly.co - mercurialshark

I created Thoughtly because many of my hobbies and interests - things I spend a lot of my time learning and writing about - are not reflected in my resume or in any single online profile.<p>Written discussions online are generally insulated within specific communities (Stack Overflow, Reddit, Blogs, etc.), making it difficult for users to retain their credibility as they cross platforms.
So we set out to quantify written discussion online and display them in a centralized portfolio. By enabling people to quickly display the extent of their involvement in a field, we provide context for online discussion. Your Thoughtly signature is a link to your online profile - which displays a summary of your written contributions online.<p>It took a better part of a year to spec out everything and build a tool that sufficiently processes and accurately aggregates written content. We also think that natural language processing is a hole in the quantified self movement. Words can be valuable data too.<p>Thanks and I&#x27;m excited for feedback. :-{<p>thoughtly.co<p>Update: It currently takes a few minutes for the server to process connected accounts and issue credentials to your profile! However it is working, hang with us for a few minutes.
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smcnally
This touches reputation, authority, credibility. Quantifying the corpus of
individuals, across sources, is a tremendous undertaking. Very cool concept
and I'll be checking out your execution following this comment. I'll post
feedback here or via dm if I don't see another preferred mechanism in your
app.

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mercurialshark
Exactly, thanks for checking us out. While we avoided grandiose statements
like "we quantify you," a person's performance and engagements overtime if
carefully quantified add tremendous value to depicting the essence of the
person. For example, I read and write significantly on science related issues
but have no hard science background. Without quantifying my online
discussions, that aspect of me is essentially lost when creating a resume or
profile.

Make sure to check out your webprofile (via Thoughtly signature), as it
supports data visualization, which is coming very soon to iOS.

I'm pumped to hear your thoughts!

Feel free to email me directly perkins[a]thoughtly.co

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read
Is your analysis able to answer the questions "Is a sentence true?" and "Is
this paragraph true?" That's something I'd like to have.

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mercurialshark
We want to avoid subjectively stating what is definitively true, as this can
be a moving target and we encourage dissent. Fields grow and horizons broaden,
however our algorithms do sort what is/isn't applicable to a field and the
quality/relevance of the content to a specific category!

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visakanv
I have been craving for something like this for Facebook. I've had so many
interesting conversations with friends over the years, I wish I could extract
all of that stuff and use it as drafts for essays. Cool work you're doing.

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jljtech
Right there with you. I love the fact that I can now pull together the metrics
for all of my shared posts and content. This can really make it easy for
people to quickly gauge someone's topic authority.

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mountainair
How do you envision your users will use their Thoughtly signatures? Can the
signature feature be used anywhere?

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mercurialshark
There are two obvious uses, but many we have yet to consider.

The first is on resumes, where context for life experience and outside
interests is missing. As we move away from degrees to skills, the importance
of quantifiable involvement in an area is increasingly valued! Secondly in
comment sections and social media. It's easy to throw around statements
online, but I think it would be great to be able to demonstrate both
conventional (scholarship) and unconventional (Blogs, Q&A, Reddit, etc.)
experience to speak with authority everywhere...

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axit
Clickable: [http://thoughtly.co](http://thoughtly.co)

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mercurialshark
Good call, thanks.

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Rizzo95
This is a great idea. Glad someone is pulling this together

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jlees
Interesting idea, but why is it an iOS app?

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mercurialshark
Thanks and that's a good question. Well Thoughtly is just starting as an iOS
app, we are about to launch the fully functioning web app.

The main reason it's on mobile is so people can just one click, copy their
signature (which is a link to their quantified profile) from the app and paste
it into any other platform, forum or app they communicate on. Since no one
wants to engage in long conversations on a phone, it's simply easier to drop
in their signature wherever they like to display experience.

Furthermore, Thoughtly has an activity feed that is really just a discussion
board. But it allows you to browse for content/news in categories you find
interesting (like flipboard) and see the objective experience and interests of
the people who shared the content/involved in the discussion.

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AznHisoka
This is basically the idea behind Google authorship.

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mercurialshark
Thanks for the feedback. While Google Authorship touches on the same problem,
a comparison however is not accurate.

Our natural language processor identifies the category of each specific
contribution, issues credentials if the contribution is sufficiently relevant
and aggregates an individual's involvement in various fields. So instead of
reading a list of the person's written work like you would on Authorship,
Thoughtly displays a summary of their involvement and turns their words into
actionable data - allowing users to forgo displaying specific work (like on
Reddit).

