

Jig, the first product from Tasty Labs - akent
https://www.jig.com/

======
igorgue
This "business model" is getting old, make a social network, make it super
popular, then do data mining, profit!

I understand this is the first iteration and they'll likely change the
product, but, it almost looks like a scam to get people data and predict stuff
like stock market; A lot of people are doing it on Twitter already, if the
founders didn't think about that they're hugely innocent.

~~~
joshu
Last startup I believed the "the data will be profitable someday" but not this
time.

I'd rather figure out an actual business model.

~~~
d_rwin
joshua, what business model are you considering without curation topics?

relevance engines and lateral developments around this space is just
exhausted.

Good to know about interests. Congratulations on the release.

~~~
joshu
i think there's a lot of stuff up our sleeves and/or still to build...

------
joshu
I made an affiliation for Hacker News readers:

[http://www.jig.com/?invite-aff=ae22bcc21ae0448c-hacker-
news-...](http://www.jig.com/?invite-aff=ae22bcc21ae0448c-hacker-news-reader)

This works if you are registering or are new.

~~~
irahul
I think you meant "registered" instead of "registering". I clicked it after I
already had registered, and it showed me notification about being part of
hacker news group.

> You are now a member of Hacker News Reader. Other Hacker News Reader members
> will see a special badge near your profile picture so they'll know that
> you're as special as they are.

Yep. I am special and unique, just like everyone else:)

~~~
cfinke
> I clicked it after I already had registered, and it showed

> me notification about being part of hacker news group.

So adding someone to an affiliation is as simple as getting them to ping a URL
with a GET request? That doesn't seem especially secure.

~~~
scq
Not secure at all. It's vulnerable to CSRF.

Embedding an iframe with the url in a html page will cause all visitors to the
page to get the affiliation.

Proof of concept: <http://s.dpth.tk/files/jigcsrf.html>

Simply visiting the above page while logged in is sufficient to get the
affiliation.

~~~
irahul
> Embedding an iframe with the url in a html page will cause all visitors to
> the page to get the affiliation.

Won't a simple <img src=...> work? Why go the iframe route?

I don't think this is going to be the final affiliation implementation they
are going to use. It's more like adding special touches for a community where
he is showcasing, and they will turn it off in a day or two.

~~~
joshu
we'll fix this later. we have big plans for affiliations, but for now they are
mostly just about the little badges :)

------
revorad
Looks fun. A simple tweet or Share on facebook button would be nice to say to
all your friends or someone specific "Hey, Joshua needs X, can someone help
him please?". You don't even need to get people to give you their Twitter or
FB auth for this.

Let people participate without signing up. At least for myself I've noticed,
once I have even a little bit of time invested in a new app, I'm more likely
to sign up. Codecademy did that really well.

Minor UI things: there's no edit button for the main post itself, but it's
there for the comments. I see I can edit the post if I click on the title and
then click Edit Details. I'd make this much simpler and faster - just let me
edit in place.

Make the search box bigger.

Let users help you with cleaning spam. A spam/rude/unhelpful button?

I'm working on a shopping search app and have been wondering how to use
social. It's interesting to see a social-first approach.

Good luck!

~~~
joshu
tweet/share: implemented, not launched. soon.

participate without signing up: i will take it under consideration but i find
that people without identity tend to behave worse.

edit buttons: ok.

search box: maybe when searching gets better.

flagging: totally agree.

------
anonymous
Could somebody explain what this is about? I couldn't find an about link. To
future startups: INCLUDE AN ABOUT PAGE.

------
artursapek
I got to see the actual page once and now it's forcing me to the sign-up
splash screen, is that supposed to happen? From what I saw though it's a cool
idea but the posts on the front page seemed confusingly arbitrary, are they
just the most recent ones?

Another user compared the site to Stackexchange, maybe you could categorize
requests in the same way that they categorize questions for the sake of
uniformity and ease on the people actually willing to to through and answer
these.

------
firebones
Looks like Quora on the surface, but much more capable of supporting targeted
advertising than StackOverflow.

Less meatspace and craigslist-y than Zaarly.

Retains that same narrow utility focus that inspired Delicious.

Agree with the sentiment that it could be a place to go if Google searching
lets you down, but suffers from that same social scalability problem of Quora
(the relatively narrow field of expertise of the quality user base limits
broad appeal; but to go broad you have to water down the content and answers
with micropayment-financed content farmers a la eHow.com which could reduce
the quality.)

I suspect that the exit will be fast like Delicious (which was two years from
start to Yahoo acquisition), so the speculative question is whose deep pockets
(or deeply-funded pockets) will this fit into? I don't view serial
entrepreneurship as a negative thing; repeating a $15-$30 million exit twice
would be an impressive accomplishment. I also wonder if history repeats itself
and whether joshu would take the same route if an embattled-but-on-the-
precipice-of-decline company (like Yahoo! was in 2005) offered that kind of
exit in 2013-14. (And all the better if Tasty Labs is simply an incubator for
multiples of these $20 million spinoff exits.)

------
andreavaccari
It's great to see Jig finally launching to the public. I had a first look in
June, when I used it together with 200 others foo campers to coordinate the
trip to Sebastopol. Then I used it again when I moved from Chicago to San Fran
to find a new accommodation.

I don't see Jig as a Q&A site because needs, unlike questions, tend to be
personal in nature and change (or even die out) over time. The same need could
be posted by multiple people in different locations, or by the same person
over time, and all could get different answers.

With that said, Jig will have to fight the only known certainty of any online
community: as your user base grows, your quality declines. I can already
notice the difference in both the needs and the answers posted now from those
of just few weeks ago. Let's hope the Jig team has a strategy in mind to keep
the trolls at the gates.

In any case, great job!

~~~
joshu
Yep! We have a lot of ideas, and a bunch of them came from reacting to the
traffic.

It looks a lot higher quality if you load your personal networks from
twitter/facebook/etc but the traffic goes by much slower, so we need to work
that.

------
jasonkester
All I get is the word "Jig" and a signup screen.

Why submit this if we're not allowed to see it without signing up???

~~~
joshu
It shouldn't. Reload?

~~~
jasonkester
Reloaded a dozen times, tried changing the https to http, followed your "hn"
link above, cleared cookies, everything I could think of. (including just
typing jig.com into a browser window).

All deposit me on the "sign in" screen.

Chrome 13.0.782.215 m, Windows XP

[edited rather than replied...]

~~~
joshu
What about jig.com directly?

------
calebmpeterson
Interesting. I'd rather not be required to log in though. I went to suggest
some a bed-ridden software engineer learn Clojure and gave up upon account
creation. The account creation was fine, I just don't need yet another
account. Perhaps you're not after the casual commenter though...

I did like the aesthetics.

------
chulipuli
I get it. Pretty good idea.

One can either do two things in the tech world:

Create new ideas (be a pioneer, and get arrows on your back as a result).

Or

Improve on existing ideas that already have a defined market.

Just like pinboard improved on delicious, this could end up improving on the
Q&A formula.

Their current approach is innovative in terms of presentation. It looks clean,
simple, maybe even Apple-like in terms of grid-like alignment.

They need to differentiate the comment/solution issue. It is a good feature.
The question allows for more data to be provided by the OP, but it is rather
bland looking and gets lost in the gray background. Make the question textbox
a light yellow to better contrast it.

I see this growing as a mix of different Q&A models. Time will tell.

Good luck to the Jig team.

~~~
joshu
I want to get away from Q&A. It's not just arbitrary questions, it's your
friends with real needs, and your neighbors with real knowledge, or whatever.

But: think of this as "create new ideas" but clothed in current UX. There's a
lot more to this idea, but we needed to ship something so that we could start
iterating with interaction from the public.

Re: comment/solution: I agree.

~~~
chulipuli
Anyhow, good luck. I'm also designing a Q&A website for my local market, so I
will make sure to follow on your activities.

------
marcamillion
Btw....can't wait to see what you guys do with the subdomain 'thingama'.

It's almost obligatory with that domain.

------
ThomPete
Just tried and post something on there.

Got some smart ass comments.

I guess jig needs some sort of flagging.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
You weren't kidding (lots of snark on display). I've always thought that
establishing a tone for discourse was one of the tougher things a new service
had to pull off.

~~~
darklajid
I know a solution: Require real names for jig!

(Okay, okay..)

On a different front: I've no clue what this even is. I see fake posts from
Mark Zuckerberg and weird Youtube quality comments. Is 'jig' a word that
should ring a bell here (and doesn't)? What's the purpose?

------
irahul
I need a notification option where I can opt out for receiving mails for needs
I raised, and not for needs I responded to.

Since it's a package deal, I turned it off completely. Had there been an
option not to receive mail for needs I answered to, but only for needs I
raised, I would have kept it.

~~~
joshu
I will add that to the list.

------
auston
Had to investigate, because I know I had heard of it before:

Tasty Labs was co-founded by Joshua Schachter, who also founded Del.icio.us,
who is also on Hacker News - <http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=joshu>

------
marcamillion
joshu...congrats on finally launching! Seems like forever since I saw the
first Tasty Labs teaser page.

A few thoughts, can you guys make it a bit MORE clear exactly what jig is on
first-load. I know the pop-up is there that asks for my zip-code and briefly
tells me what the site does, but it doesn't articulate clearly which problem
is being solved here.

Especially since the front-page looks like a 'typical' Q&A site (a la Stack
Overflow & Quora). I think you might be on to something really powerful
here...but it isn't articulated properly in the top 400px.

Maybe one suggestion might be, pushing the section that starts off with
'Recent Needs' and 'Unmet Needs' down and having a section right above it with
'Met Needs' - so it shows the solutions that have been provided to people's
needs.

I think your approach to 'intent harvesting' is brilliant....and could be VERY
lucrative. Google makes a bajillion dollars monetizing activity around
figuring out people's intent when they are searching.

But you guys are cutting through all that clutter and getting straight to the
point. From there, you can then make recommendations based on either recent
activity/suggestions from friends or products that work.

What I am seeing here is, a solution to the 'product search' problem. Where,
no longer do I have to figure out the 'right search term' to use to get the
product I am looking for.

If that's kinda the direction you guys are going, well...it sounds VERY
exciting.

If not, I am sure you have some brilliant plan working towards and look
forward to seeing how this evolves.

~~~
joshu
I kinda think that you need to show people what it's about, not tell them,
because people don't actually read.

I like your suggestion re "met needs" thanks.

~~~
marcamillion
Makes sense...I didn't mean specifically put an epistle. But really showing
them - rather than telling them in a few words.

------
tmcw
Oof, looks the application is awesome but the tone is Yahoo Answers all over
again, when everyone wishes it were like ask.metafilter.com or quora.com.

Needs more community management and focus on quality over quantity.

------
sid6376
How do i describe this to my friends on Facebook? I couldnt think of an apt
description, "A combination of StackOverflow, Craigslist, Quora", will that be
apt? Couldnt see an about page either

------
jenq
So... what did it look like BEFORE Google+ came along?

~~~
akent
Facebook. [http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/secret-tasty-labs-
prototype...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/secret-tasty-labs-prototype-
unleashed-to-a-select-few/)

~~~
joshu
Yep. It was especially facebooky because we use facebook profile images.

------
eekfuh
I love seeing Joshua Schachter went from a ridiculous domain (Del.icio.us) to
the new trend of simple, fantastic and probably expensive domains.

~~~
joshu
wasn't that bad - within epsilon of delicious.com

~~~
physcab
This may be a stupid question, but how do you go about getting these domains?
I refuse to believe GoDaddy Domain Buy Service isn't a scam...

~~~
joshu
Long story. Basically I wrote code to generate plausibly euphonic words and
check to see if they are registered.

One particular high scorer was already registered but unused so I tried to buy
it. The domain owner had others, offered jig, which was WAY better than what I
was trying to buy. So I did it.

------
jonmc12
Nice product. Kinds of needs that I think could be filled meaningfully:

Users who could not find something on google.

Users who are learning something - they are new to a domain and don't know how
to construct a query due to lack of vocabulary in the domain that they are
searching.

Users who are looking for other users - likealittle for users who want to
collaborate online.

------
revorad
Your email preferences seem to be broken. I opted out of all emails, and yet I
got an email when someone commented on a need I posted.

Please, please don't do this. I really hate it when apps do this. I want to
like you, so I didn't nuke my account this time. Have a rule in your system
which just never sends email to people who don't want to hear from you.
</minirant>

~~~
joshu
Sounds like a bug. We will investigate.

------
revorad
Couple more thoughts from using it some more:

An "I need this too" button. I saw the "a belt with no metal" post and thought
yes, I need it too! But, the only way to express it was to leave a comment. So
I didn't do it. Brevity through simple voting mechanisms on social sites is
really powerful.

The search box needs a clickable button to submit the search.

~~~
joshu
You can "follow" the need, but I agree with you.

------
kgosser
Totally jealous of all these 3 to 5 letter domain names for start ups. Path?
Color? Jig? NOT FAIR! :)

------
dannyr
Right now, the posts are all over the place. I'd love to see it more focused
on a specific topic.

Props to the incremental on-boarding process for new users. I see the
notifications at the top of my stream on what I need to do to complete my
profile.

~~~
dsmithn
Maybe that's the the "Member of" thing is for. Easy to see all the posts by
people from HN, for example.

------
sendos
I don't see this taking off.

You can get similar results using other services (twitter & facebook for
answers/recommendations from friends, and quora, etc for
answers/recommendations from strangers)

------
dclaysmith
And the novelty accounts have begun... <https://www.jig.com/need/startups-to-
buy-near-palo-alto-ca>

------
staunch
You can clearly see the Hacker News influence in the orange background color
of various elements. The jig logo itself is basically identical in style to
the HN logo :-)

~~~
joshu
The guy who did the design doesn't read HN :)

Edit: he totally reads HN

~~~
idlewords
BECAUSE WE PLUCKED OUT HIS EYES

~~~
joshu
any interest in a customer service job?

------
sirclueless
So, sort of like Stack Exchange, except without differentiating between
subdomains and there's no requirement for an active professional community
around each topic.

~~~
joshu
It's not Q&A. There's a bigger plan.

~~~
ntoshev
Will it survive first contact with enemy? Right now jig is very much like
Quora. But yeah, every successful product is a mass creating gravitation in
the product design space.

~~~
joshu
Probably not. But spending another year coding wouldn't help, either.
Ultimately the problems that we find can only be found by launching something.

~~~
ethank
I love this approach. You can only learn by launching. Congrats on the launch
Josh.

------
kleiba
Awesome idea, good luck with that!

Edit: err, that was actually _not_ meant sarcastically, although I see that
the wording might give that impression.

------
sakopov
I guess my question would be how is this different from stackexchange sites?

~~~
artursapek
It seems to be more in the way of looking for material things/people than
answers to questions.

~~~
kristaps
Wouldn't that model work as a stackexchange site?

~~~
artursapek
Same medium, entirely different subject.

------
amix
Who did the UI and design? I really like it :)

~~~
drewo
I did the current UI design and some of the implementation. Thanks.

------
filiwickers
wow. I totally missed the difference between suggest something and add
comment/question at first. Seems a bit ambiguous.

~~~
joshu
Yeah, this feels problematic to us. We'll probably merge the two.

------
southpolesteve
How much did you pay for the domain?

------
irahul
What's the technology stack?

~~~
nivertech
<http://builtwith.com/Jig.com>

~~~
irahul
It is inaccurate and only shows the tip of the iceberg. I have the Chromium
extension FWIW, but I don't trust it at all. It shows me one of my GAE site as
a ASP.net site.

------
gojomo
I think I can see where this could go. Right now people think 'any info I
need, I can type it into the Google box'. _Sometimes_ that info is about
completing tasks (such as purchases or hobbies), but not always, and the most
salient pointers about tasks often have to be read and synthesized from many
different destination pages. So, Google may not own the idea (in the public's
mind) of 'type to get help completing anything you need' as much as they
Google owns 'search'.

Jig is more focused; the smallest bits of advice, pointers, or even inline
task-completion steps that are responsive to a 'need' (rather than a 'query').
"I want…" is also more primal than "I'm looking for…"

If people have a good experience typing their needs into "the Jig box", it
might become their go-to site for a certain kind of task-query. Good
algorithms for matching 'needs' to the best-available (or just-in-time next-
created) need-meeters could give people a good habit-forming experience.

People prefer their needs be met by friends, familiar providers, and nearby
resources... but are happy to expand their consideration radius if need be.
Jig's algorithms can do the same.

And there's lots of room in that matching model for paid-placements – where
something that would otherwise be just on the periphery of someone's normal
consideration-radius gets nudged in (with fair disclosure) by promotional
payments. AdWords makes Google results better, because willingness-to-pay is a
useful metric, valued by searchers, on many kinds of queries. Paid Jig-
responses (jiggles? jigjags?) could similarly build out the value for users
while also sending revenue to Jig.

(All that said, two quibbles: 'Jig' may create difficulties when people try to
demonym-ize it, to describe users or employees. May want to be clear about
your preferred demonym beforehand. And, that highly saturated orange is OK for
the logo but kinda eye-poking when used for buttons and labels.)

~~~
joshu
turning "jig" into vocabulary seems way easier than turning "del.icio.us" into
one. i'll see what users come up with.

regarding the rest: yes, you are astute.

(Checked your profile; want a job? I should take up Brewster's offer to come
visit.)

~~~
gojomo
Sent you an email at [HN-name]@tastylabs...

~~~
joshu
Joshua, not joshu. Probably went to Nick who is getting crushed by email.

