

Ask HN: feedback on our startup project - ageofish

Hi everyone, I’d love to get some feedback on our startup idea, we just launched it for limited preview.<p>For many of us it’s hard to find good and fresh content on the web, especially for something that’s new and upcoming. This is a common problem with many popularity based recommendation websites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, or Youtube. The problem stems from the fact that they rank content in a single global bucket, where it’s hard for new comers to compete with established ones.<p>We came up with the idea to allow viral web content to spread like real viruses, by real people across real locations.<p>Benefit number one is that by associating content with locations, each point on earth has its own virtual bucket, in which we only expose content that is spread to, or created at the location. With this breakdown, new content has a better chance to be noticed. 
Then because users on our system picks (Facebook “like”) and facilitates the movement of content across locations, we create a crowd-sourced filtering system like the natural selection process. So you can trust what reached your location is good.<p>With these, we hope to bring excellent content to consumers, and at the same time democratize content promotion.<p>Our blog has more details in case you are interested: http://blog.infactio.us.<p>Our question is, would you give it a try? Does our app (infactio.us) live up to its promise?
Your feedback would be really valuable for a young startup!<p>Thanks HN community!<p>Loyd
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cyberguppy
I'm not entirely convinced that the problem you're solving is a serious one,
but I still think that your results could be fun and the locality aspect might
well result in neat things bubbling up that's particularly relevant to a
specific audience (I'm thinking the NASCAR crowd in middle America, or
anarchists in Oregon). I am interested to see how it works out, and would
participate.

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ageofish
Exactly, some content might not be globally popular, but will be very viral
locally - and good examples!

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dadads
Seen the demo video, and I'm a little skeptical about content spread having to
depend on real-life location. I like the current global bucket model, because
it guarantees best content (even if it hides other potentially good
submissions).

virus originated from Redmond, WA? I'm going to guess you are or used to be a
Product Manager at Msoft.

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ageofish
Right on with your guess :) And I agree with "it guarantees good content"
part. However, one point we didn't mention is the staleness of the global
bucket. For a generic search "funny" on Youtube, most results are 4-5 years
old.

We want to focus on upcoming talents, which means we want to bring in new
content to the mix, to some people, "fresh + good" is better than "best", and
I believe that's why StumbleUpon model is successful.

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Terry_B
I'm rather skeptical that there are many interesting classes of information
for which geography is a good filter. I don't read my local community
newspaper because it's boring. On a larger scale reddit/r/australia is more
interesting to me.

For most types of content I just want the best in the world and location is
irrelevant. If you took the best from just my area I can imagine the quality
being way below that and I live in a good area!

The best thing about the internet is how we now instantly have access to the
best content and people that exist on earth. It's no longer based on who you
happen to be lucky enough to live near, bump into etc...

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ageofish
Yes, internet made information instantly available, but it also creates
overflow. We need information to be curated (news or portal), or automatically
filtered (recommendation sites, Digg, StumbleUpon). I hope our filtering does
not stop the best in the world content to reach your location; we need to
tweak our algorithm if it does :)

By the way, we also implemented some "facebook wall", so you can see what your
friends are "infected". This helps break the barrier of needing people to
travel to, say, a remote location.

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jackpirate
I _really_ like the idea of modeling viral content after real epidemics.

Some questions:

What's the advantage of a limited preview? Do you plan to gain critical mass,
say in Washington, then open it up only there? Similar to a facebook style
growth pattern.

Why did you decide no downvote? Every social bookmarking site I can think of
has the option.

I don't like the fact that I can't see stuff for my area without logging in. I
usually lurk for a long time at a site before I decide to join and contribute.

Why don't you just grab my location from my IP address? Why do I have to turn
it on in FireFox?

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ageofish
Hi, good questions, I will try my best to answer them:

Preview? To gain critical mass around an area was our initial intention. By
the way, we are not very restrictive at the moment, as long as you request, we
will give you a preview invitation!

Downvote? To stay truthful to the real-world model, we hope to let things die
down quietly. In the next version we will be implementing flagging, and maybe
consider downvote as needed. This is a good point!

See more before joining? This is a chicken-egg problem for us now: without
large adoption, our content is suboptimal so we are reluctant to open up the
experience to everyone; but most people want to see more before
contributing...

So at the current stage, we are hoping to target the early-adopter crowd (for
example, who would wait 6 hours in the line to get the first iPad), then open
it up! I would love to get some discussion around this if others would like to
chime in!

Get location from IP? Good idea, we should give it a try! However, we probably
will stick to browser's native support - I think this is cool and might be the
future, no? :)

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scottshea
I think that it has some real possibilities especially in keeping local items
relevant. Where the previous poster's argument comes to play though is in
content that has no specific geographic tie but rather a conceptual tie (e.g.
Linux) etc. However if that is not the type of content you want then maybe it
is not a big deal.

I would suggest having someone edit your About page though to clean up some
grammatical issues.

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ageofish
Thanks for the suggestions and support!

