

Ask HN: Review my weekend project (Scribld.in) - terryjsmith

URL: http://scribld.in/<p>First, thanks for taking the time to check it out.<p>I frequently find myself having ideas for projects, startups, etc. and find it difficult to keep them all organized.  I wanted to build a site where I could keep all of those ideas together and bring people in for feedback as I needed; after two days and 30 hours of coding, this is the result.<p>If you have any questions, comments, feedback, etc. please feel free to ask them here or via e-mail (address in profile).
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I'm writing this as I go:

I hate having to log in to things to try them.

99% of the time I use a fake e-mail and junk password just to get past the
barrier. If I like the service, then I rejoin with information I'm likely to
remember.

Tried it with junk e-mail then realized you send an e-mail validation. Why? So
annoying. Will attempt to re-register and use mailinator. Success, finally!

If I happened upon this site, I wouldn't be confident enough in what it does
to ever create an account. Too much hassle to create an account for something
that I have very little idea of what it does. It takes notes and lets me share
them? I don't see the value.

Ok, I'm signed in... now I _finally_ get to see wtf this thing does.

It's basically a way for me to create tiny discussions about stuff. Kind of
neat... except for the fact that people are going to have to log in to comment
and view any of my scribbles.

If you could make things more open by alleviating any need to log in, I might
use it.

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terryjsmith
Yea, I get that and this was a call I had to make. The service allows you to
uploads files, share links, etc. so I wanted to have some accountability for
that. You can however check out the public scribbles in the Scribbles section
at the top; maybe I should make that more clear? Maybe I should add a
tour/features/walkthrough page to highlight what it does?

There are certain things I definitely want accountability for but I could add
the ability to do some things anonymously (comment maybe?). I should mention
that you can invite people to participate in your scribbles which will
alleviate their need to validate the e-mail address since the invite has to go
to a valid e-mail.

I like the simplification of "a way to create tiny discussions"; I may use
that in the future if that's okay with you :)

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"A way to create tiny discussions" was an idea I had for a start-up 3 years
ago that I simply never got around to doing. I think there is a massive
potential for such a thing, given that there currently isn't any easy way
(that I know of) to create a tiny little forum somewhere quickly and easily.
Right now, the closest thing is creating a post, or a note, or a group on
Facebook and having really crappy discussions ensue. The Facebook discussion
system is just awful, and it's a walled garden.

I think you should go with the "tiny discussions" idea, since I regrettably
haven't.

There's no maybe about a tour/features/walkthrough... you need it. You need to
adequately describe what your service does and why I should use it.

Like I said before, I've been thinking about the commenting space for about 3
years now. I've watched things like Disqus, Facebook Pages, and Ning pop up
well beyond the time I had the idea of simplifying and unifying discussion.
And, still, it seems nobody has managed to nail down the massive market of
tiny forums.

To put this in perspective, google for virtually any type of forum. iPod
forum. Nissan forum. Twilight Forum. Etc. The top results you'll get for each
of this will be massively popular and lucrative message boards. Basically,
they'll be a good domain name with PHPBB loaded up in them, and that's
sufficient to get a critical mass of people using it. Now, think to yourself:
in the next x years, what new products, movies, brands, etc will be created
that will have potential for these similar types of lucrative forums? You
can't know the answer. But as the future unfolds, the market will know. And if
you could capture some of this market, you'd be in for a lot of traffic.

My conclusion is that the best way to go about this is to have users create
the forums. I think there is a lot of money to be made in discussion forums,
and user-generated forums is how you guarantee you are the first to capture
the market's need for a particular forum. Think: A wikipedia of forums.

I realize this post might be pretty incoherent and barely related to your
weekend project. Sorry, I haven't eaten breakfast yet.

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vineet7kumar
Nice utility. Few things that I think can improve user experience : 1\. User
gets no clue about what it is, what to do, how to do until and unless he
creates an account. (there should be some kind of demo/trial stuff before
logging in). 2\. Even after logging in the documentation is very limited.

The thing is that User should know what to do. I understand it's a weekend
project but i guess u can use HNers comments to improve it .

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terryjsmith
Absolutely, thanks for the feedback. Maybe this was a mistake on my part, but
I wanted to use HN as a sounding board for improvements since it was built for
me and it therefore obvious to me what it's job is. I figured it could be more
useful, but needed some direction after living in my own little bubble this
weekend.

Thanks again for the feedback! I'll put together a walkthrough and some help
info and maybe some guiding information messages after you've signed up.

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freshfey
I was looking for something like this, but I would find it even more useful if
it had like a mindmap feature. Not a classical mindmap, but more like "linking
posts together" function. Because I like to review my thoughts as a whole, so
a mindmap does a better job there. Nonetheless I do like the simplicity.

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terryjsmith
I like the idea of mapping posts to each other. Are you thinking of having a
full "import" of one scribble to another or more of a related scribbles?

Thanks again!

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freshfey
It depends on the kind of idea I'm using it for! But I think linking in terms
of import would be more useful.

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terryjsmith
Clickable: <http://scribld.in/>

