

Ask YC: Need advice on direction of site. - ptm

I launched my site 2 months back (subavatar.com) as a Commenter Avatar + Profile + Comment History + Karma service.  Based on the initial feedback I dropped the Karma part and changed the domain name (from ipkarma.com to subavatar.com). making it like Gravatar with profile + comment tracking.  Now I'm having thoughts about dropping the avatar part.  What direction going forward do you suggest I take ?
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wastedbrains
I looked around the site, and thought it was confusing. I saw the avatar
stuff, but I didn't see much about the comment tracking which is more
interesting to me.

I like the idea of co-comment and integrating to work with any comment system,
but ti seems to fail often.

Disqus and Intense Debate are cool, but I don't really want to have to switch
over my blogs and other systems to just get comment tracking. I don't care as
much about the karma of comments I guess.

So I would perhaps focus on that, because as a blogger and someone writting an
app, I am unlikely to change the code of my systems to support your avatars, I
would be happy if the comment tracking worked by default. Then I might point
out the service to readers on my blog or make a link by the comments like
"track these comments with subavatar"

On your page I would show example screen shots of the avatars and comment
tracking in action on some site. I couldn't get a very good feel of what the
avatars were like. Perhaps have a link to your own avatar to let people see
what the whole profiles look like.

Good luck

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ptm
I realised by analysing user feedback that the comment tracking is the main
USP of the site. Subavatar supports fallback avatars, if you only want to use
the comment tracking feature with your current avatar service.

My profile <http://subavatar.com/user/6e00c923a13ce323523d417e40c1537e>

The initial release had an elaborate system generated avatar system
(Identicon), but found them very cold, inhuman and controversial (some of them
looked like swastikas). I've converted them to a simple color coded
placeholder now.

PS all avatars are linked to their profiles.

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8en
I don't know what an avatar service is. Is it a picture of me? I think other
people might not know what an avatar service is either.

