

Ask HN: Please give us feedback on our (anti-social) tool thinkery.me - nader

Alex and I built this tool (http://thinkery.me) because we were unhappy with existing apps like Evernote, delicious, historio.us, pinboard.in or other software on the market. Every tool we examined needed too much work to organize your stuff or does only one thing.<p>We wanted an app that extends your brain by:<p>- making it super fast to add new things, urls, todos, just throwing everything at it that is in your brain<p>- automatically extracting relevant content like text, audio, video, images (using oembed but also scraping the page identifying the relevant content)<p>- quickly finding your notes with instant-search<p>- keeping things private or making them public (to share them on twitter, facebook)...<p>My public things: http://thinkery.me/nader<p>Example of extracted page (truncated due to copyright reasons, private things dont get truncated): http://thinkery.me/nader/4d2ec7f67477595c14000000<p>Example of oembed content: http://thinkery.me/nader/4d245b10747759f448010000<p>We're not perfectly sure what direction to take. What we're sure of is that this needs a working mobile version but for the rest...would you rather focus on making the app more social or add features like:<p>- assigning things to / inviting other people (@-syntax?)?<p>- dragging'n'dropping of images into it?<p>- create filters so you can only display private / public things?<p>- extracting even more content by aggregating similar things?<p>- automatically retrieve tweets you favorited?<p>It would be awesome and very much appreciated if you gave your thoughts, feedback or posted any bugs you encounter. Also say if this is a tool you would use or what is missing so you would use it.<p>Looking forward to it!<p>PS: There is a delicious importer in case you want to try that out: http://thinkery.me/delicious.php
======
grigory
One of the examples of what to enter into thinkery, "Who the fuck is JSON?
#thought", is in poor taste and I'd recommend changing it to something else.
Not that I personally find the word "fuck" offending, but it does feel
unnecessary and out of place.

~~~
nader
I thought that would be funny but it seems I'm the only one, so gonna change
that into something more meaningful. Sorry if you were offended by it :/

~~~
grigory
Oh, not at all! I get the idea, but the word just really stood out to me, and
not in a good way. So I thought I'd mention it :)

------
nategraves
All in all, I like it. It's simple, useful, and the app gets out of the way to
let me do what I want.

Some points of feedback:

\- The tagging functionality is kind of buried and isn't labeled at all. I'm
not sure how prominent you want to make it, but here are two thoughts: you
could allow for dragging of an entry to a tag on the left (this would be even
more useful if there was a way to add a new tag on the left) or you could add
tagging functionality before the edit page (like above or below the preview
panel on the right)

\- I put in the wrong pw on the delicious importer but didn't see any error
message.

\- Again, I'm not sure if this is a direction you want to go, but it seems
like there might be some interesting collaborative elements you could
incorporate; like logged-in users being able to leave notes on public items

\- Mobile would be nice, as would a browser plugin or desktop app that allows
me to dump in content easily.

Most of my feedback would put you on a path to be more of a bookmarking
service and maybe you want to leave things more open than that. Either way,
congrats for making a great app and good luck going forward!

------
notahacker
As I'm a big fan of storing things in clumsy, inefficient ways just to get
them down (drafts in gmail is my thinkery...) I can definitely see the appeal
of something that just lets you type away with minimal structure.

The hashtagging of absolutely everything works really well #like

I like the idea of being invited to "Login to your brain" ;-) #interface

The facility to copy/paste in non-media files as well as text would be nice...
obviously this takes up more bandwidth but that's something you can easily
charge for. #suggestion

Whilst I very rarely use them, I think a screencast demoing the sites
functions would be a good idea #suggestion

More social probably helps you promote the app, but your suggested feature
list sounds a lot more _useful_

Also, like a number of people I seem to have had small problems with
register/login (specifically the validations advise email addresses are
incorrect if you paste/autocomplete them into place). #bug

Delicious importer doesn't seem to work with Yahoo IDs. Not sure if there's a
way around that #bug

------
tst
Firstly, I love the easy use of adding and searching items.

Recommendations:

* Use more width for your design. It does have too much white space on the right side and therefore too few space for your content (Firefox 3.6.13 on Mac)

* There is text beneath your footer

* your logo on /titncs is blurry

* Maybe you could add an "processing" message, especially for amazon links

------
muyyatin
Mobile apps would definitely be a priority for me, with an emphasis on fastest
speed for adding things (should work well with the tags). Also, the paranoid
me can't find an explicit privacy policy. Are private notes encrypted?

In addition to the Ubuntu issue already pointed out, the copyright overlay is
blocking the bottom of your pages on various browsers, specifically "Get your
own thinkery now >>" on the main page and "embed.ly" on the About page.

Tagging and display looks very useful. Overall I like it, and I'll be watching
in the future for the mobile apps.

------
anujkk
I registered but was unable to actually try the service due to some error -
"We couldn't interconnect the neurons.Please excuse and try again". Anyway, I
saw the urls provided by you and here are some suggestions -

1\. If appropriate, deep integration with facebook, twitter, linkedin etc, not
only to ease registration process but also for sharing content(in both
directions)and other social features.

2\. Utilize FB API to provide a social network around your service and let
users share/comment/discuss/rate/etc. about your public things.Provide top
rated/discussed thinkeries somewhere on your home page.

3\. Instead of making it just public and private, provide access levels -
public, friends, private, customized, etc.

4\. Mobile application for quick/anytime/anywhere thinkering.

5\. A search interface for searching public thinkeries and adding them to your
own collection.

6\. Facility to add thinkeries through SMS, email, chat etc. example - SMS
your new design/startup idea to your thinkery using short code or forward an
intersting e-mail to your thinkery. That leads to another idea that e-mail and
chats can also be a kind of thinkery items.

~~~
nader
Thanks for your feedback, lots of what you've written sounds very good. We'll
put it on our list.

First we need to fix some bugs though. Did you get the error when you hit
register or at another point?

~~~
anujkk
I got the error after logging in @ my home page

------
woodall
Give me options to share my thinkeries on my FaceBook wall and Tumblr and I
would definitely use it. I might just start using it anyway.

~~~
nader
At the moment you need to set a thing "public" then copy&paste the link into
Facebook. We're gonna introduce FB-Share/Like and Tweethis-Button soon. Is
that what you meant/wanted?

------
dsmithn
I think I've found something I didn't know I was looking for.

Also...when I start to add a bookmarklet and click "cancel", it takes me to an
error page.

I _think_ I'd rather not lose the page I'm on when I bookmartlet it, but I
haven't used it enough to decide. If I click cancel I definitely don't want
to. Maybe a new tab?

------
akirk
clickable: <http://thinkery.me>

------
spiffworks
I'm using Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu, and the 'Try it Out' and 'Register' buttons
are overlapped and the whole page is awkwardly clustered into the left half of
my screen. Sorry to start you off with a bug report, your product solves a
very real problem.

~~~
nader
No need to say sorry, thanks a lot for the feedback! We haved tested the site
on Firefox 3.6 for Mac, Chrome and Safari. Unfortunately there goes the cross-
browser-madness again because it's different on all systems.

You can try it out without registering if the main input field works, it's got
lazy registration :)

~~~
hasenj
If you paste something in the text box, the gray/hint text doesn't disappear.

------
marklabedz
When I tried to register, I get an error upon entering my email address -
"invalid email address" - I tried closing and reopening the register window.
(I'm trying on Chrome 9/Win)

Otherwise, just looking through it - like the layout and the general concept
is intriguing. To answer your question of focus, I like the idea of filters or
aggregating additional content. (But please let me choose whether or not to
accept those new content streams.)

EDIT: When I register from the homepage, the form works. Previously I tried to
click register while viewing your sample Nader page.

------
chanux
Try it out/Login buttons seem broken to me.

<http://imgur.com/aKDjW>

Firefox 3.6 on Ubuntu screen resolution 1280x768

------
microsage
The concept is great. Love the low friction of the free form input as well as
the public/private dichotomy.

One minor bug I encountered: If I enter "I like #foo" and save it, it is filed
under the tag #foo. If I then edit that item to be "I like #food" it stays
filed under it's original tag, #foo, rather than being moved to #food.

Edit: edited to clarify bug description.

------
iterationx
I can't register because my email address is too long 30 chars, it says
"please fill out all fields appropriately" I'm running Chrome

~~~
nader
Wow, long e-mail address :) Gonna fix that, btw you can check thinkery without
registering by simply typing something into the input field.

~~~
anujkk
Make it 320 characters long. You never know how long e-mail address people can
make.

~~~
akirk
actually there was no restriction on the length of the e-mail address but
rather a problem with Chrome's autofill.

------
hasenj
I like it.

I've been using a combination of tumblr/facebook-status-line to do these kind
of things.

This is much much better.

------
joakin
Hey you have something really attractive here, after lunch im gonna try it,
and if it convinces me, i'd be very sorry for workflowy but i'd leave them.

More comments later :)

------
eventi
I like it - make the private lock clickable though - the other icons do what's
expected, but the lock icon does nothing

------
lux
Definitely need a mobile version. I write most notes on the go, and I'm sure
that's true for a lot of people.

~~~
olegious
yeah, love it, but won't use it without a mobile version :(

------
nader
Thanks HN community. Your feedback was very valuable to us and awesome!

------
u48998
Licorize does something similar.

I don't see anything new.

PS: I'm bitten by the type of services you note above, my "brain" is stored
locally on my browser backed up by myself, I'm fine with what I have..

~~~
nader
Didn't check out Licorize yet but from a first impression this looks a bit
different with the "projects" and "todos" ... or maybe i don't understand it
fully.

Did you check out the content extraction, instant-search or posting a youtube
url for example?

Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
nader
One more thing: I'm also using it for things like a shopping list where you
can add a sentence with hashtag (like on twitter) and it automatically
generates a tag out of it for you to filter.

<http://thinkery.me/nader/4d2b4a6e747759286c000000>

or something like an amazon product:
<http://thinkery.me/nader/4d1d0ec2747759af42000000>

