

Ask HN: Review our app - LiveBite - alecthomas

Hi Hacker News,<p>For the last couple of weeks we've been working on an app that surfaces the most "popular" articles from social networks in an easily digestible form. We're deliberately targeting the ADHD crowd.<p><pre><code>  http://www.livebite.com
</code></pre>
We're a couple of iterations in, and have more improvements coming. There are some rough edges, including occasionally poor image selection, dodgy snippeting, and so on, but we're iterating fast.<p>We'd be grateful for any and all feedback. Design, content, anything, so we can improve the system.<p>Thanks!
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Tiomaidh
Clickable: <http://www.livebite.com/>

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To be honest, I kept expecting it do something else. Once I came to grips with
what is was--a collection of popular news links in a visually-pleasing and
easily-navigable form--I was quite happy with it. No, it doesn't have comments
--it's not HN or reddit. No, it doesn't have accounts--that would be effing
worthless in its current state.

So here are a few minor suggestions:

* Make it so that clicking on--for example--the washingpost.com link will instead go to a LiveBite page containing only stories from the Washington Post. (This is very similar to what reddit does.)

* It'd be nice to have an option to see more than six stories at once. If you do that, it'd also be nice to have an option for a "condensed" view--with smaller or non-existent pictures, different layout, etc.

* The [Like] button seems a little funny where it is, but I can't think of a better pl--that's not true, I'd prefer it at the bottom. Um, I can't think of a better place with respect to actually getting people to click it, so I guess it's fine where it is. Some might say it fills in the space nicely, I'd say that I'd prefer a more minimalist look (and that the background is exciting enough as it is).

More major ideas--take 'em or leave 'em:

* Accounts. These would enable:

* Bookmarking (aka "saving", in reddit-lingo)

* Customizing the sources scraped. The option to remove a few defaults would be nice. The option to add more sources would be fantastic.

* Persistence for the UI settings suggested above.

* The ability to tag some sources as being "must-read" (or whatever) and then keeping track of which stories are read/unread.

* Probably other things that I can't think of right now. And maybe users themselves will start requesting things.

As I said, these are more major ideas that I just came up with on the fly (I'm
not even proofreading this...). Some may not be in line with what you want the
site to be, some may be just plain awful. Do what you want :)

