

Two months of hard work. What do you think of my startup? ZoooV.com - waleedka
http://zooov.com/
<p>
======
waleedka
Note: I had to put the description here because it didn't show below the
title.

So, this is my second attempt at building something people want. How am I
doing? ZoooV is a social news site for niche subjects. Here is why I built it:

With the big social news sites: Digg, reddit, and recently after the name
change, news.yc, the discussions tend to become more general as the
communities grow because we, the readers, have different interests. And
because of that, only what's common to everyone goes to the top. Smaller
communities have more focus, but it's hard for them to survive because there
is less to read, and therefore, we tend to visit them less often and
eventually forget about them.

I'm trying to solve this by keeping the communities smaller and focused, but
allow the individual reader to choose the communities they like and I create a
custom page for them where they only see what they're interested in. This way,
even though the individual communities might have low volume of stories, the
reader will always find something interesting to read in one of his
communities or the other. It's like how an RSS reader allows us to keep track
of low volume blogs because we don't have to remember to visit each one of
them.

~~~
darragjm
i like the idea of customized social news gathering, but i'm not sure if a
community structure is the right way to do it. i don't think most people want
to limit themselves to a particular community of stories. most of us have
pretty broad interests and, while we may want to read more about a particular
field over other fields, that doesn't necessarily mean we want to read ONLY
about that field.

i envision a system where you sign up for an account and you subscribe to your
own personal RSS feed with content similar to Digg/Reddit and over time the
site learns your interests based on the stories that you click on from your
RSS reader. each feed would have user-generated tags associated with it and
will begin showing more (but perhaps less popular) feeds that share tags with
feeds that you've previously viewed. over time, your personalized RSS would
contain only feeds that it knows you're interested in, and the random feeds it
included at the beginning in order to learn your interests would gradually be
phased out.

the layout of the site is great though. i'm just not into the community/forum
idea too much.

~~~
waleedka
I guess there might be a misunderstanding here. The idea behind Zooov is that
you can join multiple communities at once, not just one. Then, your home page
will show the communities you joined all in one page (but in separate
sections, like Google News).

Your idea addresses the same problem from a different angle, and it's a good
idea, actually. Though it's much harder to implement.

~~~
apgwoz
I don't really see how this is much different from my.reddit.com, but I could
be missing something...

EDIT: sorry, I jumped the gun before I started reading more of the discussion.
I look forward to seeing what comes out of it.

------
myoung8
Lol. When I landed on the home page, my first thought was "Why did this guy
post a link to a site that hasn't launched yet?"

I thought it was one of those parking pages chock full of ads. You really
might want to change the design a bit...

~~~
waleedka
Yes, I do realize that Web sites with ads are sometimes looked down upon,
especially in the tech community. Because that's how I used to feel. But
recently I started embracing the fact that ads are what makes the Internet
free. Without them, we'd have to pay 5 cents for every email and 15 sent for
every search. I'll see what I can do about the design, though. Maybe I can
make it less "messy".

And, none of the ads on the home page are paid, by the way. They are links to
other very good startups[1].

[1] [http://selfdebugging.com/2007/09/24/list-of-selected-
startup...](http://selfdebugging.com/2007/09/24/list-of-selected-startup-ads/)

~~~
greendestiny
No, he means the entirety of your site looks like a domain squatting ad page.
Most domain squatters put categorized ads on their pages, and your links look
similar to that. Have a think about the design of your content. But two thumbs
up for the idea.

------
mynameishere
I like the idea, but don't really like the look. Kind of messy.

And the "niches" that I'm seeing are: "Beautiful mind", "Post launch", "Break
time", etc. Those aren't niches but uber-vague references to niches.

~~~
waleedka
These are the ones I could think of. Hopefully, people more creative than I
would suggest new subjects that are more interesting.

------
ph0rque
> ZoooV.com

> Read amazing stories submitted by amazing people, like you.

Always make your users feel smart. Nice touch.

------
palish
Congrats!

The front page seems a little noisy.. Perhaps the box on the right that
explains what the site is about could be colored to draw attention to it?

------
h34t
I'd like to see a service like this designed for easy exploitation of 3rd
parties like myself who want to create a social news community for their own
organization/website, but don't want to have to run it off their own server (I
don't want to have to install and manage one of the digg/reddit clones
myself). It could remain 100% public and controlled by ZoooV, and I simply add
a snippet of code to make it available on my site with all interactivity
enabled (No, I don't want to just include an RSS feed, I want it to feel like
my own site's community area).

I don't see why the functionality of reddit/digg couldn't be applied to
small/medium-sized groups with great success. I don't see anything about this
style of interaction that makes it exclusively valuable for catch-all site
like reddit.com or digg.com. I think it could/should become a standard feature
for all kinds of intranets / blogging platforms / website providers.

For example, I might start a community called 'Product Development in China'
and integrate it into my website, or my Ning social network, or my FaceBook
Group... then if some of my friends (or strangers) like it, they can add it to
their websites/blogs as well.. soon enough the ZoooV community is getting a
lot of users as a result of exposure on these 3rd party websites...

Maybe the feature set I'm looking for is available elsewhere (is it?).

------
pius
I think it's got potential, but you should work on your design and copy. It
wasn't obvious to me at all why I should use it over instead of one of the
many popular "social news" sites. For inspiration, take a look at what
37signals does with their products.

When you've got a startup that essentially revolves around one improvement on
what vast numbers of competitors are already doing, you've got to make it
blindingly obvious what I'm gaining by using your app.

------
kirubakaran
Cool!

Ask HackerNews: How many of you were working on pretty much the same idea? I
was :-(

------
r7000
I understand that its niche subjects _but_ I wouldn't describe it that way in
your tagline. Its doesn't sound very interesting. I also wouldn't say "social
news". keep it simple. Say: news about "all" subjects (instead of niche) or
"new/fresh links about the topics _you_ want to read about" or something along
those lines.

~~~
r7000
Also where it says "Customize this page to see only the communities you like",
"Communities" is too confusing to someone just landing on the page. And the
names of the communities are kind of cool but too confusing. When I read
"Beautiful Mind" I glossed over it.

This could really work if executed right. I think tighter focus might be
something that could partially solve the social news "lowest common
denominator" problem.

~~~
waleedka
This kind of feedback I can only get from someone seeing the site for the
first time and reporting their first impression. Thanks a lot. I'll see what I
can do about it.

------
tx
I like your execution: the site just screams quality, and I would surely read
it if there was content. But I am not convinced this is _different enough_
from reddit with more categories, or "communities" how they call them. And
they (reddit) _are_ adding more.

------
vegashacker
Can someone make their own niche site themselves, or do you have to make it
for them?

~~~
waleedka
They can't yet; but the plan is to allow it later. I need time to understand
what's involved in building a community and maintaining it so I can put the
right governance model in place. For example, if someone creates a community,
do they get the right to censor it? Who decides what's considered spam and
what's not? Voting or the admin? Things like that.

~~~
jkush
I think you should plan on making that a feature ASAP. My interest level just
went down when I read that it's not available now. Giving people the tools to
create a community is a very powerful concept.

I think your idea could really work waleedka, get that feature out now and
refine it as you go.

------
iamyoohoo
I like the concept.

However the question is, why would people go to this site as a destination
instead of a niche site itself. Example: If I wanted to learn about internet
marketing news - which isn't covered by digg, reddit etc, i'd go to plugim.com
which is focused on that. Why would I go to zooov as a destination site? and
then would you be able to build an audience enough for each and every niche.
That's the problem with building a site that's wide enough ...

good concept though - good luck.

~~~
waleedka
I believe (or hope) that it's not an either this or that situation. I read
digg, reddit, and news.yc. Each has a different flavor. My favorite is news.yc
because of the narrower focus and the quality of people, but I read reddit
when I'm looking for random stories.

------
johnrob
The community boxes look like ads.

------
german
The page looks good, I like the layout, the only thing I would change is the
header.

About cool the startups sidebar, that would make a great community!

What do you think about that?

~~~
waleedka
I think it would be great if we have a community for low-budget startups to
help each other. Getting new users is hard. And you don't get a real
appreciation for how hard it is until after you launch. That I learned from my
last project. So, I created the "Post Launch" community because I realized
that there must be a lot of people in a similar situation like mine: launched
and trying to market their startup. I hope we can use it to share marketing
ideas, arrange banner exchanges, and so on. Is that along the lines what
you're thinking?

------
benhoyt
Not sure it matters _too_ much for sites that have login page that aren't
https, but better not to email people their passwords (clear text). It also
indicates you're probably storing passwords in the clear, see
<http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html>

------
jsmcgd
What languages/frameworks did you use?

~~~
waleedka
On the server, ASP.NET and the free version of SQL Server. On the client, the
Yahoo UI library, which I highly recommend, and a lot of hand written
javascript. But I tried to avoid being too fancy with AJAX, so I used it only
for things like editing in place and voting without reloads.

The only fancy AJAXy thing I have is the bookmarklet. Which is kinda cool, if
I may say so myself :) I haven't seen any other web site use something like
it.

~~~
dcurtis
Yuck, asp. Why did you choose .net over lamp? And I agree, the Yahoo UI
Library is awesome.

------
knewjax
Stick with it. Nice start. I like the improved logo from last time i looked as
well.

------
breck
I found 3 interesting articles I hadn't read before right away. Thanks!

------
trekker7
This is pretty cool! Your idea is good, but the implementation needs
improvement. Please keep working... if done well I'm pretty sure I would use
this!

------
alaskamiller
So.. like a web forum meets reddit/digg?

~~~
waleedka
Exactly.

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blored
Keep up the great work waleedka. The site looks much better from when I last
looked at it.

Mark

------
dcurtis
For some reason, parts of that site look extremely familiar...

Nah, I'm crazy.

------
popup
good work, i think you didn't waste your time... your article amazing and
new..

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goodgoblin
Great idea!

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ardit33
oh common. yet another rippoff. this web 2.0 is getting silly.

dig+reddit+collegehumor+??? = profit

