
Lists - zbravo
http://avc.com/2015/11/lists-2/
======
idlewords
I run a bookmarking site, which is an ecological niche in the world of lists.

The pattern I've seen over the years is that a bookmarking site will arise,
based on some fairly specific idea of what managing bookmarks should look
like. As it catches on, the owners will discover that people have distinct and
curious ways they like to manage their bookmarks. In an effort to grow the
site, they will add features that try to please these different
constituencies, and eventually end up with a kind of insipid and aggressively
social product that no longer appeals to the initial audience, and resembles a
lot of other sites.

At that point people move on to something else, and the cycle begins again.
Sites that break out of it (like Instapaper or Pinterest) seem to succeed by
picking a very specific vision of bookmarking and sticking to it.

I think of this as "abstraction syndrome", where you are tempted at every step
to build a more abstract version of the product because of the diversity of
uses people put it to. But that very process makes the project generic,
boring, and less useful than the original niche idea.

I believe a similar dynamic explains why no one has "solved lists". It's like
"solving social" or "solving writing". The details are where the fun is.

~~~
8ig8
For the uninitiated, this guy's bookmarking site is Pinboard
([https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in)). It's a fantastic service and I
hope it never changes.

~~~
omilu
pinboard rivals google in importance to my workflow and life.

~~~
idlewords
That fills me with terror. And thank you!

------
bambax
Excel is also the Mother of all list-making apps. From Spolsky (May 2000):

> _When we were designing Excel 5.0, the first major release to use serious
> activity-based planning, we only had to watch about five customers using the
> product before we realized that an enormous number of people just use Excel
> to keep lists. They are not entering any formulas or doing any calculation
> at all! We hadn 't even considered this before. Keeping lists turned out to
> be far more popular than any other activity with Excel. And this led us to
> invent a whole slew of features that make it easier to keep lists: easier
> sorting, automatic data entry, the AutoFilter feature which helps you see a
> slice of your list, and multi-user features which let several people work on
> the same list at the same time while Excel automatically reconciles
> everything._

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000065....](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000065.html)

~~~
inopinatus
I drew a line in the sand some months ago, and it was _we will not turn our
product into a spreadsheet_.

But when customers need certain capabilities, sometimes the "obvious" solution
looks exactly like a spreadsheet, since we deal with sets of related, domain-
specific lists.

Those are always product-breaking, lazy-minded solutions that in the long run
won't serve the customer well and generate mountains of technical and UX debt.
Like a "miscellaneous" category for UI actions, they indicate a shortage of
insight and imagination.

------
danso
One of the favorite lists of all time -- in terms of both contemporary utility
and in simplicity, is the MacRumors buyers guide:
[http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/](http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/)

Maybe it was slapped together in a cumbersome way, but I can't imagine it
having to be anything more complicated than 3 lists (or spreadsheets), if
you're relatively anal about normalization: One for the list of products, one
for the list of updates per product, and one for the list of of articles per
product (which could be auto-generated via a tagging mechanism).

Not only is it something that is useful to me almost on a monthly basis...it
underscores how greatly lists can augment the limits of human memory. I mean,
seriously, just a few years ago, Apple had just a handful of product lines,
and even then I couldn't tell you roughly how many months it had been since
the last iPod or iPhone release, nevermind how much that time period is
compared to the average release cycle per product. And yet by tying those
public and easily-gatherable facts together makes something incredibly useful.
I'm surprised no one has seemed to have done it for Android...though to keep
your sanity, you'd have to restrict it to the main manufacturers and lines
(Nexus, Galaxy, Note, HTC One, etc).

~~~
state
That's a good example. But as you hint at: managing the content for that is
probably pretty annoying for how simple it is.

~~~
danso
What I meant was that it may have started out as cumbersome (i.e. someone's
Word document)...but hopefully by now they've moved it to a spreadsheet-like
format. Given that Macrumors is a well-established site, I wouldn't be
surprised if it wasn't baked into their CMS as some kind of module...though it
really could be done as a set of spreadsheets (or YAML) and then as a static
site.

How long would it take to research every iPod-era-and-onwards Mac product line
-- including dates of refreshes/announcements? I bet no more than a
day...especially if you just start from the Wikipedia page, which needs some
cleaning up of taxonomy, but is pretty good (and relatively machine-
parseable):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._product...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_Apple_Inc._products)

There is definitely some editorial decision making that needs to be done about
how to best classify things. But the Apple product line is pretty small, so
the number of decisions -- e.g. should "iPod classic" and "iPod touch" be
separate "families"/product-lines -- is relatively small.

After you have a list/spreadsheet of product-lines and dates...then it's not
hard to write a script that calculates the number of days between each
subsequent release...which gets you much of the main utility of the Macrumors'
guide: days since last release, and average days per cycle.

(it'd actually be kind of cool to see this done with the major programming
languages...)

------
callmeed
Some of my favorite vertical lists/services are:

* Eater: they have a "Top 38 restaurants" list for each city they cover [1]

* Wirecutter: most WC posts aren't lists but rather "X is the best product in category Y" but many have runner-up products. They also have a lot of cool gift-giving lists [2]

* Producthunt collections: I'm not completely sold on PH as a whole, but their collections feature is pretty cool. I have a few I use as bookmarks more than anything. [3]

* Business Insider: they have a "10 things in X you need to know today" ... it's not perfect but a nice way to get the news while I'm waiting in line at the coffee shop [4]

* Trello: IMO its the best personal, flexible list making tool

[1] [http://la.eater.com/maps/best-los-angeles-
restaurants-38](http://la.eater.com/maps/best-los-angeles-restaurants-38)

[2] [http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/special-gifts-for-your-
favo...](http://thewirecutter.com/reviews/special-gifts-for-your-favorite-
people/#transport)

[3] [https://www.producthunt.com/@callmeed/collections/startup-
na...](https://www.producthunt.com/@callmeed/collections/startup-naming-
domain-tools)

[4] [http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-tech-you-need-
to...](http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-in-tech-you-need-to-know-
november-30-2015-11)

------
fomojola
Odd: Pinterest seems to me like the breakout published list platform. No one
said lists have to be words only: a Pinterest board is just a list with
pictures.

~~~
callmeed
Yeah, but boards don't really take center stage in Pinterest's UI. Feeds and
search results are really an amalgam of various pins and boards.

If I wanted to see a board of "25 Great Christmas Gifts for Under $25", it's
not obvious where to look or whose board is authoritative.

~~~
AznHisoka
A lot of people use Pinterest to build lists of gifts or whatever. That's the
main use case. Discovery is secondary, in my opinion.

------
r3bl
GitHub turned out to be a pretty decent place for collaborating on various
lists.

I mean, the list of awesome lists[0] is currently the 23rd most starred GitHub
project.

I'm using GitHub both as a collaborative tool for creating lists and as my own
tool for creating lists (as an example, a list of books I have read / am
reading / planning on reading [1]).

[0]
[https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome](https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome)

[1] [https://github.com/aleksandar-
todorovic/notes/blob/master/00...](https://github.com/aleksandar-
todorovic/notes/blob/master/00_books.md)

~~~
yogiHacks
I'm really glad you brought up GitHub in this way. I have been using GitHub
for much more than versioned code storage.

For example, I've been using it as a collaborative writing zone with a friend
of mine. Our use is definitely nothing too remarkable, but as far as
collaborative writing goes, it's not easy to imagine a product with more
technical capabilities than git.

The real hurdle is just non-technical people being intimidated by the terminal
/ command prompt. I'd like to think that stigma is on its way out, but
wouldn't we all?

~~~
cben
Have you looked at [http://penflip.com/](http://penflip.com/) or
[https://draftin.com/](https://draftin.com/)?

------
ddw
Silly article, but isn't Trello doing pretty well? They take it to the next
level by making lists of lists of lists accessible.

~~~
beat
I don't think of Trello as a "list app". It's a kanban app, which is a kind of
list I suppose, but "list" is way too vague for it.

Kanban is a pretty specific case. There have actually been a number of apps
attempting to do kanban boards. Trello is the only one I've tried that
actually works well.

~~~
krallja
Counterpoint: I have never used Trello as a kanban board, with predefined
column names, left-to-right motion, and strict WIP limits.

I have a board for my house, with columns for "buy/sell", "maintenance",
"check later".

I have a board for my family, with a column representing an upcoming
milestone/event/party, and cards representing tasks my wife and I still have
to complete.

Our company uses a top-level Company Report board, with each column
representing a company goal, and each card representing an in-progress
project.

I've also seen boards represent options and possibilities - "everyone add a to
the column of the conference(s) you want to attend this year" \- then the card
becomes the locus of planning for that person's conference travel and so
forth. My family did this earlier this year when searching for a home to buy -
each card was a house, and the columns approximately represented
neighborhoods.

------
zzzmarcus
The List App [https://li.st/](https://li.st/) is currently getting some
traction by being promoted by a bunch of Hollywood people, notably the
founder(?) B.J. Novak.

------
ricefield
I remember being excited about lists way back when Path was path.io and
apparently a tool for creating and sharing lists
([http://readwrite.com/2010/02/15/first_peek_at_pathio_the_ste...](http://readwrite.com/2010/02/15/first_peek_at_pathio_the_stealth_startup_from_face)).
I was really disappointed when it turned out to be yet another social network,
and no one has really seemed to crack this space yet (maybe Trello, or
Workflowy?).

------
davidwparker
For me Google Keep is by far the best list management tool out there- it
solves the singular use case very well.

For the network use case, I think there are "levels" to it- some of which Keep
solves.

For my wife and I, we share lists for groceries, errands, restaurants to try,
etc. Keep is absolutely fantastic for sharing with only a few people.

I think there may be a level at which point Keep wouldn't handle a lot of
people- though I'm not sure exactly what the level would be- but I haven't
really tried it beyond a handful (4-6) people.

------
0898
Just out of curiosity, when did lists become a medium in their own right? To
me, they're a formatting choice. Are 'lists' a thing?

~~~
zaroth
Yes, in fact when you look into it, there are a surprising number of products
which are putting different UX around simple ordered or unordered lists.

------
yogiHacks
The second type of list this article mentions, social lists so to speak, is
definitely valuable to users and probably isn't receiving the specific
attention it deserves. Foursquare as a "public itinerary" for a trip through
select art galleries in NYC is a great example. Informal, public education
could also be orchestrated with these "social lists"; reading material /
exercises listed out in a syllabus and shared among interested parties.

Something that I think is pretty silly is the novelization of the fact that
there are not many "single user list apps" that have transcended themselves
and become "social / public list apps". I think that's because a whole heck of
a lot of people will write lists on platforms which are not list-centric, ie:
a physical notepad, text messages / emails sent to yourself, nodepad
smartphone apps, or even just notes written on your freaking forearm in
sharpie!...

Lists are an interesting topic though, and when you think about it, an
enormous portion of the internet really only functions as a list delivery
system. Lists of popular links (Reddit, hackernews), lists of friend's
pictures (Instagram), lists of friend's life updates (Facebook, Twitter
et.al), lists of categorized media (Pintrest, Tumblr), lists of queried
results (google, duckduckgo, search et.al)...

But I gotta say that lists as an integral motif of IT is a really cool
concept.

------
austenallred
It really depends on your definition of "list." I would actually argue that
the entire Internet is made up of lists, but there are a few things that
change the way we see them:

* Cadence (how often the lists changes)

* Content type (what got on the list and how did it get there)

* Sort (how the content is sorted)

If we wander back into the earlier Internet, Yahoo was arguably the dominant
player. And what was Yahoo? A list of links divided up by category.

Google came along and won the game because it's better in the world than
anyone else at sorting lists of webpages. It's so good that it can actually
sort them without having anyone ever see them or read them, and that allows
them to scale to a level Yahoo couldn't even dream of, with better results all
the while. Google is the best, technology-enabled list-making service in the
world.

Now the way most people use Facebook is to see a list of all the stuff their
friends have posted about. Originally it was ordered solely by time, but now
they have a little more data about what you like to click on and what/who
you're interested in, and help you out a bit.

Twitter is a list of what certain people and organizations you follow are
publishing right now.

HackerNews and Reddit and ProductHunt are lists of the best X as decided by
the community, with a gravity (or 24-hour session) added so the older stuff
falls down over time, keeping them fresh.

Pinterest, although not a list in the sense that it's a vertical
ascending/descending list (unless you're on a mobile device), is in actuality
a list of all the products and photos your friends are gathering into their
various collections.

The purpose of Yelp and Foursquare is largely to give me a list of places I
should go to based on the information provided by my friends or the crowd.

In other words, the reason you're not seeing lists is because you're thinking
of "lists" as a two-dimensional object; something in which someone comes in
and compiles a list of X and others consume it. In reality this is happening
in several ways, there's just often a lot more nuance and color than someone
coming through to create their own collection.

At the end of the day, a list is just a data sort. The Internet is _made_ of
lists. The interesting thing, at least in my opinion, is how you accumulate
that data and how you sort it. If you define "list-making" as the accumulation
and sorting of data, almost every big tech company I can think of is in the
list-making business.

------
meesterdude
As someone entering this space, this is an interesting topic, and there are
some good ideas and discussions to be had in this thread.

One thing I've noticed, is that some lists are better served via different
mediums than others; this might be the difference of putting something into
apple Notes versus apple Todos. Sometimes you just need a list for reference,
and other times you need each to represent something actionable.

Other times, the lists are directly associated with a service provider: amazon
wishlists or netflix watchlist (note both have 'list' in their name) and are
both geared towards furthering your investment in their platform. They aren't
a core aspect of their business plan, but they are helpful to users.

Lists have also been around for quite a while! a chapter could be said to be a
list of pages (if you consider a list a collection and a collection a list);
and the index is certainly a list of chapters.

------
yuxt
workflowy is the best list and mostly underappreciated app.

~~~
bambax
Came here to say this... but actually, when I think about it, I use it much
less than I could/should. It gets confusing after a while: you can't find the
lists you have, and start making the same list over and over again (in my
case, things to pack when going out on a photo trip).

It would help to be able to attach metadata to items, and especially to have
the app record the date of each item, and then be able to sort all items by
date (regardless of depth, etc.)

------
beat
Thinking about this more, the problem isn't that list apps are an underserved
market, but rather that they're an _overserved_ market. Making a list app is
easy - so easy that "make a list app" is the glorified "Hello world" used to
demonstrate real-world code for lots of Javascript frameworks and other
language libraries.

Successful examples are vertical, not horizontal. The obvious ones mentioned
here are Trello and Pinterest, neither of which are "list apps" in the
standard sense. Other ones coming to mind are Buzzfeed-style click-bait, of
the "Here are 17 stupid things! Number 4 will shock you!" variety - but those
aren't so much lists as bait technique.

------
akg_67
The article missed the mother of all Lists that turned into billion dollar
business during last dotcom boom - Yahoo! Directory. It is unfortunate that
Yahoo! shut down a service with lot of potential specially in the mobile
world.

Just think of possibility if you were starting with the Yahoo! Directory,
making it mobile friendly, location aware, and providing users the ability to
favorite, specific entry, add to the directory, comment on entries and
directories.

Majority of businesses today have online presence. Starting from scratch is
difficult. Getting users to build a list from scratch is difficult. Offer them
a pre-built list/entries based on location and let them refine it.

------
jingwen
I remember using this list-making site _years_ ago, but somehow stopped using
it. It reminds me of the modern day Pinboard, but for actual generic lists.

[http://listography.com/](http://listography.com/)

------
shade23
I agree with you on several parts,And there have actually been some decent
attempts which i regularly use [1],[2]. I find it fascinating how people use
Github to maintain curated lists. But I find list-making as an art in
itself.It requires the curator to be able assimilate information in bite sized
packets which are informative enough. As a rule,I feel that the size of each
list item should inversely proportional to the size of the list. Collaborated
and community curated lists are a god-send. Stack-Overflow also maintains
really good lists/community articles.

But then think about the lists which are a single person's hardwork or maybe a
group of people being paid to do so. A list need not necessarily be objective
and can also provide the curator's views. This can be good or bad dependent on
breadth of the curators knowledge. Lists(like really well written articles)
are often the result of extensive data analysis which is why lists like those
provided by WSJ and WGSN[3] are paid/exclusive services.

[1]:[https://github.com/wasabeef/awesome-android-
ui](https://github.com/wasabeef/awesome-android-ui)
[2]:[https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-ios](https://github.com/vsouza/awesome-
ios) [3]:[http://www.wgsn.com/en/](http://www.wgsn.com/en/)

~~~
meesterdude
> As a rule,I feel that the size of each list item should inversely
> proportional to the size of the list.

What are you talking about? That seems completely nonsensical. if I have a
list with 100 items, i'm not going to restrict each list item to two words, or
two paragraphs, if the verbosity is needed. That is completely detached and
separate from the role of lists. If thats how you like to do your lists that's
certainly your choice, but a rule? seems a bit much.

~~~
shade23
You can obviously append extra details separately,but if someone gave you a
100 page list which contains every possible detail of every item.Then would
you read it? Would you use a dictionary which contained everything etymology
to usage and derivations on the same section for each and every word?

EDIT : And yes that is definitely not a rule I would enforce on someone
else,but it is a 'guideline' i enforce on myself while reading/making lists

------
napoleond
I don't understand this post at all. The reason no one has built a monopoly
around lists is that they are a ridiculously cheap commodity, both for the
personal and network use cases.

~~~
callmeed
sure but you could say the same thing about tweets or 1-5 star restaurant
reviews

~~~
freshhawk
Which both need significant network effects to be useful to people.

How does the list making app get exponentially better the more people are
using it?

~~~
dirtyaura
As is obvious from the post, Fred meant a list services that are used to
publish lists for others to consume. Lists like the MacRumours' Buyer's code
mentioned in the top comment.
[http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/](http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/)

There's an obvious network effect: producers and consumers, more of each makes
the service better, if producers get something as a return, even if it is just
silly internet karma points.

------
gobengo
Lists aka Collections aka Containers. There are so many manifestations of this
pattern on the web that we really ought to try to standardize how one can
create them, and read and write resources that are members of them.

W3C, MIT Decentralized Information Group, Web Annotation Protocol, Oracle, and
IBM (amongst others) are working on it. [http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/REC-
ldp-20150226/](http://www.w3.org/TR/2015/REC-ldp-20150226/)

------
wdewind
I think the reason no one has nailed the distributed list making part is
because that's basically email, which it's really hard to improve
substantially on, it turns out.

------
state
Simple, general-purpose personal publishing is not really a part of the modern
web in any straightforward way. There are plenty of special-purpose
'listmaking' services — but it's hard to imagine one tackling the problem in
the general case because it's just not a great business. Email gets shoehorned
into this usecase because it's one of the only personal publishing tool that's
totally decentralized and really easy to use.

[edit: grammar]

------
beat
Why on earth would anyone bother paying for a list app, when there are so many
ways to do it for free? The best you could do is try to write something really
excellent and get bought as a replacement for one of ${GIANTCO}'s existing
list products. So best case for a team is probably an acquihire, and it'd
require a fair investment for scaling at zero revenue to get even that.

~~~
meesterdude
basecamp is a list app, and they've been very successful in the space, and
have remained small and independent for over 10 years. They were also
bootstrapped, and managed to scale; but they did have revenue to support that.

~~~
beat
I think there's plenty of room for small, independent list apps in niche
verticals. But the original article isn't looking for Basecamps. They're
looking for a unicorn.

------
snowwrestler
Friendly reminder that Foursquare still exists, from one of its early
investors. :-)

But seriously, lists are useful because of their content. What a list does is
condense information--an artifact of curation and maybe prioritization. So the
value of the list correlates with its author.

Some lists are popular because they are curated by experts (newspaper
restaurant reviews). Others are popular because they are curated by crowds,
and thus express a collective social signal about what's valuable (Reddit,
HN).

So, I'd have to say that lists are a horizontal thing. Lists will succeed or
fail based on their utility and relevance, which to me says that lists don't
really compete across verticals, except to the extent that everything competes
for mindshare in general.

------
orliesaurus
After reading this blog entry and some of the comments it is obvious that
tools like KimonoLabs and Blockspring are here to help fill these gaps. Excel
is indeed the mother of all list-making apps and will probably stay like this
forever. Why do you think Google Forms / Typeform allow you to (or default) to
saving the data in Excel? It just builds a complex list out of those cells..

Basically the reason is that these are the tool our generation has grew up
with and we find it hard to tell people to use anything else...

Why am I mentioning those companies? Because they help you make lists from
data that isn't necessarily available with an interface - I'd keep an eye on
those guys

------
jedberg
[https://delicious.com](https://delicious.com)

Started as a way to make lists for yourself, turned into shared lists.

Heck, reddit's original idea was pitched as Delicious with voting, so you
could say reddit fits this group too.

~~~
joshu
started as a way to access ~/links - one very big list with notes, i guess.

------
guiomie
I thought it was a silly post at first, then I remembered I had in gmail draft
emails for lists of: to read books, to watch movies, to never forget quotes,
to never forget girlfriend related facts ... etc

~~~
meesterdude
haha, oh man! I used to have drafts open in apple mail and do the same thing.
But it just became a mess for me; i'd have 100 draft windows open, with
various bits of useful/useless information. The drafts were autosaved, which
was nice, but they just piled up for me, and all came rushing back if I
restarted apple mail. That was one of my primary motives for building my own
solution.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
> I am somewhat perplexed by the lack of breakout success to date in
> listmaking. It’s an obvious category. And it is certainly not for lack of
> trying. The commercial internet is 20+ years old now. So you’d think someone
> would have cracked the code by now. But I don’t think anyone has.

I bet someone has cracked the code, but it didn't become fashionable. The
commercial internet being 20+ years old is just more time for fashion to
change, and not an indicator of potential success.

------
lemevi
The killer list app will appear when AI is better. Lists are very personal
things. They can cause stress, they can be important or not so much depending
on the context. They intersect work and home life. The killer list app for
executives is their executive assistant. Once we have a little machine
implanted in our skulls that is smart enough to make fun of its wearer, ala
KSR's 2312 qubit, the killer list app will remain elusive.

------
tequila_shot
Can this be because, there is no _need_ for making an internet based solution
for lists. Pen and Paper are working just fine for me for for the past 3+
years.

------
bachmeier
Lists are only part of project management/collaboration, and because that is a
situation where needs vary widely and the benefits of customization are huge,
it is futile to try to design an app for making lists. The best list making
app is a good scripting language. Wunderlist, Evernote, todoist, etc. all have
nice features, but they are just not ever going to work for more than a small
percentage of the population.

------
lifeisstillgood
The most impressive list I came across recently was the FSF ethical gift guide
- [https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v6/](https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v6/)

I have bought one item off it and am paused at the (no credit card, Romanian
payment page) of another. But really the FSF could become the consumer guide
for the net and I would happily read all their lists.

------
presty
I've been working on this since around the beginning of the year, still a lot
of things missing, but might as well get some feedback since this "topic" has
been getting a lot of attention (with BJ Novak's app and Fred's post and
others): [http://alpha.ohyeahlists.com/](http://alpha.ohyeahlists.com/)

as the url implies, it's still in alpha stage

------
civilframe
I created a little tool that helps you made lists of things with defined
properties. For example, I can use it to make a list of houses I am thinking
to buy, and also a list of my favorite movies. By being able to define the
_properties_ of the list item, you can make any kind of list. Check it out:
[https://listmakr.com](https://listmakr.com)

~~~
civilframe
Per the article, I am considering turning it into a social/sharing platform,
where the content is user-defined lists of things. Thoughts on that?

------
lifeisstillgood
A little more on subject, and I am totally failing to find a good todo list
app. I am not sure what I really want but something like

\- can extract todos from my code \- can be very very context aware (location,
time, am I in code base or out on street or on a phone call?)

To be fair that last one is the list problem - it's an Embodiment of
intelligence - a list is a marker for a agent, that jogs my memory at one
point in time

~~~
SyneRyder
I use Toodledo [1] for contexts. You can actually filter your task list by
context, and I've created similar contexts myself to what you've described
(i.e. "On Phone", "At Laptop", "Out Of House"). There's a separate field for
Locations, and you can set reminders for when you're near a specific location
if you want.

Times are easy, you can set a Due Date / Time and a Start Date / Time. I use
that for Gardening ToDos that can only be done during daylight hours.

It won't extract todos from code, but there's a way you can email to-dos into
Toodledo, so you could write a script. There's a full API as well, but I've
not put in the time to get that to work.

The web version has Saved Searches, which are really custom views on your to-
do database. You can create your own searches use boolean logic, substring
searches as well as filtering by field.

Works on mobile & web, with some third party clients for both desktop and
mobile. (I actually use Ultimate To Do List on Android instead of the official
Toodledo client.)

[1] [http://www.toodledo.com/](http://www.toodledo.com/)

------
newman314
Quip is my tool of choice. Shared lists and easy transition from desktop to
mobile and vice versa.

I can start a list on the phone while I'm out and about and continue when I
get to a desktop machine. Nice way to organize different contexts/subjects.

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kordless
You could argue data structures represent business models and that a startup's
true nature is how their data structures are tied to their customer's needs.
Or lack thereof, in some cases.

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lubujackson
There's no "killer app" for lists because lists are dumb subset of rich data
that we are much, much better equipped to navigate than we were pre-Internet.

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instabulous
I've recently been using an app called Mashfeed
([http://www.appstore.com/mashfeed](http://www.appstore.com/mashfeed)), which
lets you create & follow lists of social media feeds from the top networks
(Instagram, YouTube, Twitter). It basically combines all the posts from the
selected feeds into a master feed, making it easy to stay on top of content
you're interested in, without all the clutter. this app should def be on the
"list" (wink wink) of apps for list making!

~~~
bonham22
I was just gonna comment about this. I've been a huge fan of Mashfeed for
about a year now. Surprised I don't hear about it more often. I hate how the
big social media networks give me one huge feed to sort through. Mashfeed lets
me organize my favorite feeds from Instagram and Twitter into lists so I can
literally only look at posts I want to see without scrolling through a bunch
of nonsense.

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thethimble
Spotify seems to be the antithesis of this. It offers a really good UX for
creating, sharing, and consuming playlists.

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theklub
Sharepoint

~~~
ianmcgowan
Actually, combined with outlook tasks Sharepoint makes a pretty good to-do
platform - you have a site per project already. Add a task list to each site
(which you may already do). When you go to the mysite (or newsfeed, or
whatever they're calling it nowadays) you see a consolidated list of all open
tasks, including your personal ones from outlook).

I'd argue that the killer feature for a todo list-making app is the ability to
delegate/share a task and _then track it_ without your own list becoming
overwhelming. Outlook is 90% of the way there, but strangely haven't seen a
huge uptake in the BigCo's I've worked with...

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ARothfusz
these guys took a shot at short lists of favorites
[http://www.5avs.com/](http://www.5avs.com/)

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nawitus
icheckmovies is a reasonably successful website, where the core feature is
lists.

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mceoin
We encountered this “orthagonality” in the early days of SFDevLabs while
trying to build a list-based site for navigating the Internet. Our approach to
list creation was bookmarking, yet the more we build for the individual, the
more we built a siloed product and strayed away from the potential of network
effects, which was objective in the first place! (whoops)

I’m still fairly-well convinced that list-based sites are superior to google
for discovery, and a combined list-site/discovery-engine could be a huge boon
for finding new and relevant content on the internet. (Google might be fast,
but it is far from pleasant and isn’t great for a “wandering” mindset).

Pinterest is the obvious standout here IMO. They nailed the individual use
case (I speak to designers and females all the time who use it for
vision/inspiration boards), and they leveraged their connected content into
what I believe is the best discovery engine for visual-based content online —
to put it in a “Facebooky” way, they have structured data, which is immensely
valuable. Suffice to say, humans can process and navigate bulk-imagery better
than a page full of text, so Pinterest was well-poised to have this effect on
the previously non-visual search landscape at the time.

Some points I think about:

* BIG PICTURE: We’re missing a “site map” of the internet, and a horizontal list site has the potential to provide the navigation experience that we need.

* As an experience, the “related” search on google is pitiful; the internet deserves better. (e.g. [https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=related:avc.com/+avc)). I think the search experience on a list-based tool will mimic this action pretty closely, but will give a way better result.

* Form factor is an issue for content creation. Generating lists from URLs isn’t pleasant on mobile (I haven’t found a satisfying way around this yet), so I suspect the power-users will come from a web-first generation — unless a novel approach to the mobile piece is created and adopted.

* Horizontal list sites require a bootstrapping mindset. They’re inherently unprofitable in the early days unless you’re going after product-focused lists, in which case it’s difficult to break out from being nichy/materialist. My prediction is that we’ll keep seeing product-focused lists while in a boom-cycle (Wanelo, canopy.co, kit, etc.), however they will have a hard time breaking out of the consumerist space if those are the origins.

* The process of list-building is extremely similar from one vertical to another (bookmarks, music and fashion, for example), so despite the lack of a horizontal product that is a clear winner, I still expect one site will dominate in the long run due to network effects, similar to how Reddit effectively dominated the forum space.

* We’re in the midst of a boom-cycle, so the ideas I’m seeing around me all seem to be very money-focused (nothing wrong with that, there’s just a different focus), however I expect a true horizontal list-building site will take a patient long-term approach that will emerge in thriftier times when rent and talent is cheaper and entrepreneurs are freer to try wild ideas.

* The technology behind creating and leveraging connected graphs is more approachable than ever (Neo4j & GraphQL come to mind). Powerful “woven” experiences with overlapping content are possible with a fraction of the engineering talent of, say, 5 years ago. I personally think this is an interesting variable to watch, as it could be the bridge between the individual and social use-case that you mention. (Put mildly, we can extract more utility from less content creation).

* Community is the key. Slightly contrarian but I see the injection of too much capital as a potential killer of list-based ideas. “Easy money” (if there is such a thing) and not-enough focus on fanaticizing an early user base will be the death knell of all who enter this space.

* What is the correct balance between altruism (wikipedia) and narcissism (social products)?

\- What are the lessons from Delicious? By all accounts, it should have “won”
but lost its way somewhere (the acquisition?). Social bookmarking still
deserves a better solution.

\- I think the original list spaces of a horizontal winner will come from an
area that is extremely nichy, extremely nerdy, text-heavy and unprofitable (or
not obviously profitable). Maybe it’ll start out with poets and researchers
and spread from there? The smaller the community, the better, because there’s
greater recognition for contribution when everyone knows each other.

~~~
lubujackson
I worked on a project for a while with exactly these assumptions, but haven't
been able to find the magic sauce to make this approach flow the way it needs
to. I think my one discovery, though, is that any new Internet "site map" is
going to have to be carved out of some level between websites and web pages.
Websites are too broad, while web pages are too ephemeral.

------
wslh
Now, this is weird... I submitted exactly the same link 1 day ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10646580](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10646580)

