

Ask HN - Please help me improve my app (Twitter job search) - jraines
http://www.twhired.com
Dear HN,<p>The job posting/search arena in Twitter is wide open, so I built this little app.  It's nothing special yet but I think a good foundation.  It's human filtered and has full-text search.  Where to go from here?  I just noticed that #tweetmyjobs is a trending topic on Twitter -- how can I get twhired on there by making it useful to people?  (A better source stream is one obviously, I'm using a pretty basic twitter search RSS right now.  Pagination, location . . . what else?  Would any Ruby/Sinatra folks like to work on it with me?
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BSeward
I suspect #tweetmyjobs is trending simply because TweetMyJobs' many accounts
hashtag it to every post they make. Their posts are automatically-generated
got-to-fit-in-140 gobbledygook, and several of their accounts that I checked
have been suspended presumably for their repetitive nonsense content. It looks
like a developed-by-the-lowest-bidder infrastructure designed by people who
haven't really thought things through (you're expected to register an account
in order to see the list of Twitter accounts? And can only browse job
descriptions by visiting those Twitter accounts and then clicking a shortlink
that then links back to the site?). TweetMyJobs is, as far as I can tell, a
mess. They're getting publicity only because their hashtag hit some Twitter
mindshare event horizon and gave people something to talk about without
needing to investigate too much on their own.

So, uh, I appreciate that you're focusing on making yours more useful. Long-
term approval usually comes from products made with care.

While searching for a job, I physically am usually limited to a few applicable
dimensions (physical location, field, experience range). If I could tailor the
experience on Twhired to target those dimensions then it would make my
interactions much more effective. A focus on mining or transcribing accurate
location and field metadata plus an interface for drilling down based on those
would be a good way to fit my needs as a user.

~~~
Tichy
Trying to make the trending list by spamming didn't occur to me before.
Interesting thought, although personally I never look at the trending topics.
But I guess we'll see more of that spam approach in the future.

~~~
jraines
Here's a spammy thing I've seen that I expect to see more of "@JoeBlow is
giving away a Widget! Retweet this for a chance to win!"

~~~
Tichy
True, but luckily it is easy to unfollow the participants in such schemes.

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jraines
Dear HN,

The job posting/search arena in Twitter is wide open, so I built this little
app. It's nothing special yet but I think a good foundation. It's human
filtered and has full-text search. Where to go from here? I just noticed that
#tweetmyjobs is a trending topic on Twitter -- how can I get twhired up there
by making it useful to people? (A better source stream is one obviously, I'm
using a pretty basic twitter search RSS right now. Pagination, location . . .
what else? Would any Ruby/Sinatra folks like to work on it with me?

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showerst
1) Your search doesn't tell me anything when there are no results, Try
searching for "DC" and you'll see what I mean

2) Auto-suggest would be really helpful in the search, to make it easier to
make my location string well-formed.

3) Letting me just pick a state/city from a list craiglist style would be
nice, although I can see how that would be a bit of UI clutter.

4) Some of your 'view this job posting' urls are broken, i see @jobshouts

#jobs Territory Sales / MKTG / Consulting Positions - F/T - \"Leads and Pre-
Set Appts\" - (OUTSIDE SALES) in Atlanta,Georgia ...

leads to <http://jobs/> You also appear to be escaping quotes in a way that's
showing up on the homepage =P.

That's just from a few minutes browsing. Looks like it could be a useful tool,
keep up the good work!

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Mystalic
Picking areas is important in job searches. You do need to find ways to
integrate it.

You need to look at similar features on major job search engines and integrate
a few of them if possible. I knwo it won't work as well, but that woud be
nice.

Also, the ability to turn a search result (i.e. design San Francisco) into an
RSS feed.

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ivankirigin
Don't use "twa" in app names. It's tired like the flickr r. Also, many people
don't know how to spell "twhirl", despite many thousands of users. I'll look
at the actual app shorlty.

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mrtron
Your job posts on the main page look like google ads for some reason.

