

Show HN: LiveNinja - a video chat marketplace to buy and sell expertise - willaaye
http://www.liveninja.com/

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fourstar
Initial thoughts:

Way too much stuff going on. Why are you forcing my scroll to be messed with?
Most sites that have *ninja in the name I immediately think of as immature. On
/browse/ you have just WAY too much javascript happening. I'm tethering on a
3G connection on a train right now and it took > 30 seconds to load
everything.

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Falling3
The ninja thing just needs to go away. I'm tired of ninjas not being sneaky
asian dudes with swords.

"Yoga Ninja" just does not sound right.

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songzme
Chuck Norris was as good as a ninja as any other.

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mrgreenfur
I like the idea a lot. I worked at a larger company who offered a consumer
service like this for a while. We found that most consumers really didn't
convert well for the service and we had to pump in lots of marketing to get
results. The most popular categories were 'psychics' and 'health'. Basically
people who had STDs and were embarrassed and people who wanted their fortunes
told. That said, there was a non-trivial amount of cash in those topics...

edit- I forgot programming. That was a big category as students often wanted
their homework done for them...

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hariis
Thank you for sharing this info, very valuable.

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wheaties
Feedback: The image gallery type of thing on the search ninjas was neurotic on
my machine and I'm running latest Chrome and Ubuntu. By neurotic, I mean that
it jumped around quite a bit. Not smooth at all.

Take out "ninja." Yoga ninja? Golf ninja!? I just want a Golf Instructor...

Btw, what company are you going through to get the video chat? Did you do that
yourself?

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changdizzle
they are using TokBox[0], which offers a video chat API for web sites/iOS
apps/Android[1]

[0] www.tokbox.com [1] android coming soon, alpha is here:
<https://github.com/opentok/opentok-android-sdk>

disclaimer: i work at tokbox

~~~
wheaties
Very nice. I have to give you guys a try.

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ttruong
Congrats on launching. The site looks great.

Some feedback:

* On the browse page, you should remove the ninja after the person's expertise. It makes it easier for the expertise to stand out when scanning the experts.

* It wasn't immediately obvious to me that the green circle meant that the ninja was available now--maybe something more obvious if you want people to start a session in an ad hoc fashion vs scheduling a future session.

* It might be useful to show the people an onboarding page with the type of help you could get from these ninjas.

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jat850
The "Browse Ninjas" page has some extremely distorted photos. I am not sure if
your tiling is algorithmic or what but it's probably not very appealing from
the perspective of the people on that page (or the people seeking them out).

(edit: Firefox 15. Have not tested in Chrome)

~~~
willaaye
Thanks for the feedback! It's a known Firefox issue and we are working to
resolve it right now.

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volandovengo
Congrats on launching! I love the idea - this is somewhat similar to
clarity.fm.

The site itself is pretty but seems to have some UI issues which are slowing
down the site.

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pacomerh
They need a ninja to fix their page. Not very agile on the JS.

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jk5331
Why doesn't the button on the top right have a function?

