

Show HN: WhatMyFriendsRead.com - social link sharing - rhave

Somebody said "Launch early, launch often", so I guess it's about time.<p>WhatMyFriendsRead.com -- a social recommendation service for interesting links and content. Main idea: What is interesting for you is what your friends find interesting. I made a functional prototype hacked together in php+mysql with ugly html+css. But it works which is why I guess now would be a "launch early" moment. Or atleast show to a bunch of people for feedback :-)<p>On the site your main source of links is from people you add as your friends or people you subscribe to. People you subscribe to provide you with links by posting them. Friends provide you with links both by posting them but also by reading other peoples links. By reading them they recommend them to you. If you want to change the type of content you are getting then you have to change your subscriptions or friends. This way the normal karma driven paradigm is changed to a more action based paradigm. Your actions can have the effect of people subscribing or unsubscribing you.<p>I have a number of problems with my site, which I would like advice on:<p>- I have no idea how to drive traffic to my site. The site doesn't really work without having a critical mass of people using it, so I have to bootstrap content into it somehow. I also have to get people to visit it somehow. I thought about reddit's self-served ads as a cheap way to present it to users, but I'm not sure if I'd hit the target audience - whomever they might be.<p>- "Prompted by login-form". The concept only really works if users make profile on the site and invest some effort in setting it up with friends. I think it's a serious flaw that there is no readily accessible non-authed part of the site, but how do I fix it? Auto-generate a user to new visitors and link them to some default subscriptions?<p>- Lack of business plan. No idea how to break even, let alone earn money on the site.<p>Some background as to why I made it: In the fall (2010) Reddit was invaded by Digg users. Reddit.com won the Digg-Reddit "war", but in my opinion the old Reddit-userbase lost, as the site was somewhat diluted. A lot more pics on the frontpage, and less serious articles. My initial thought was to design a site that could withstand a large influx of new users without changing the experience for existing users. If the existing users mainly discussed tech news and there suddenly was a large influx of lolcat loving people then the original users should still mainly see tech news and the new people lolcats. Whatmyfriendsread.com was the result.
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rjrodger
I think this can scale nicely as fits into Venkatesh Rao's "warren" concept:
[http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-
the-...](http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the-edge-of-
legibility/)

Two things:

1\. Throw some HTML5 gradients at this baby - they're not that hard - cheap
way to look web 2.0

2\. Do create anonymous users, but architect it so that all user profile
storage is browser local - this keeps your costs way down - and gives users an
incentive to register as they can then use it in other browsers.

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rhave
Thank you very much. Interesting article that ties together concepts from
different fields.

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jasontan
my early feedback -- this seems like a natural candidate for using Facebook
authentication. you could post to the user's Wall "I just read X" and there'd
be a natural viral factor.

driving traffic... most startups have that problem. HN, reddit, digg, email
relevant bloggers, tell your friends (that's without spending anything).

making money -- seems like ads would be the way to go. if this took off, i can
also see "sponsored content" mixed into the recommendations, ala "promoted
tweets".

good luck!

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rhave
Thanks!

I thought about FB integration, but decided against as I wanted to have a
transparent privacy model. In my opinion the privacy becomes somewhat opaque
when FB gets involved. I'll give it a second thought though. The natural viral
factor is appealing.

Ads are somewhat obvious. If I placed them on the comment page related to each
link it might be possible to make them somewhat targetted. I hadn't thought
about sponsored content, thanks. It probably ain't relevant yet though, I
guess the site needs a certain size before it comes to that.

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nmaio
<http://WhatMyFriendsRead.com>

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mhlakhani
I had this idea a few months back as well, the few discussions I had with
people gave the impression that there's definitely a demand for this.

your implementation seems great as an MVP IMO, good luck with it!

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rhave
Thank you. I think it's funny how the same idea spawns several places at once.
And great to hear that you guys think there is a demand for it.

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duinote
cool. how long did you use to put this together?

