

Ask HN: Feedback on my newest project - symbiotic

URL: http://trophysight.com<p>One of my friends is an avid hunter and fisherman. He had the idea for a social network for hunters and fisherman to share pictures. I'd love HN's feedback on the idea and the current implementation!
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icey
I think the idea is pretty cool, but why do you need so much information
(first name, last name, email address, birthday)?

If you just required a username and a password, and then made everything else
optional, I think you'd get a lot more signups.

I didn't feel like giving you all that information so I didn't bother creating
a login... but if you haven't done it already have you considered adding
voting to the pictures? This would be a perfect use-case for the new Facebook
"Like" buttons. Thinking about it, maybe Facebook connect would be a good idea
as well.

[Edit: You may want to do something better for your privacy policy if you are
going to require all this information. Big blocks of "lorem ipsum" text aren't
very confidence inspiring. You may also want to change the "you're bound by
the ToS when you register" text until you actually have some terms of
service.]

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symbiotic
We do need birthday because you have to be at least 13 to register but you're
right about the rest, especially the TOS... going to fix that now :)

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icey
You may want to look in to FB Connect, I think it will solve a lot of those
issues for you.

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symbiotic
Yeah FB Connect is a great idea! I think many of my potential users are
probably already on facebook already.

As far as the TOS go, I'm a little too poor right now to hire a lawyer but the
university near me has a great program where law students (supervised by a
lawyer) offer free services to entrepreneurs. I'm signed up for that program
but it doesn't start until June.

Any suggestions for how to fill that privacy policy and tos in the mean time?

~~~
icey
I'd remove them both for the time being, you don't need all that formality
yet.

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hga
I was brought up in a family of avid hunters and fishermen (although I find
fishing boring and prefer target shooting over hunting), and here are some
things you might want to add:

Size.

Weight.

Distance for hunting.

More details on gear used.

The place where the game was caught in addition to the home town of the
sportsman.

On question here is do you want to do this free form, with perhaps some
suggestions to the user, and then have to police abuses (e.g. anything that
passes a profanity filter) and have things look a bit irregular, or do you
want to try to limit and regularize the inputs?

If the latter, type of lure or load would get onerous and would get really
obnoxious for handmade flies, hand loads, etc.

And then there's people like my father who has about 2 12 gauge hand loads he
uses for his Browning Auto-5s, for small (dove and quail) and medium (grouse
and pheasant) upland birds. If he were the type to put up pictures like this,
I'm sure he'd prefer being able to pick from those few options (no drop down
lists though!) rather than entering the details each time (I'm sure he
wouldn't bother to do the latter).

And, yeah, the profile slider is very nice.

Good luck!

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binarymax
I really dig your profile slider on the trophy board! Is that a plugin you
used or something you hand coded?

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symbiotic
That was hand coded. It took me forever to get it working in IE6 :)

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symbiotic
Clickable link: <http://trophysight.com>

