

Subjot: A Topic-Based Twitter, Without The Noise - giffc
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/31/subjot-a-topic-based-twitter-without-the-noise/

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rwolf
Since every thread on HN about google+ has a top comment about how google+
should have this (self-tagging, able to follow user+topic in addition to being
able to follow user), I'm glad someone has written something like it. playing
with subjot will give me a feel for how this concept plays out in practice--
well done!

~~~
joshu
IMO self-tagging fails in broadcast mechanisms, because people are massively
incentivized to distribute things as widely as possible.

we're thinking about how to add categorization to jig, so i am thinking about
this a bunch.

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ccarella
joshu I love your work and would love to talk to you more about this in
general.

There is a disincentive to using a more generic subject and broadcasting out-
of-context on Subjot, which is that people unfollow you.

I saw one user doing that in our private beta and I unfollowed him, since the
entire premise of Subjot is having a feed of stuff that is interesting. We
have a very unfollow friendly culture, so it's not a faux pas to unfollow a
subject that you don't find interesting.

It is not a one size fits all solution but it has been working for us. Just
like you wish you could unfollow your friend who live tweets the entire
episode of Gossip Girls, on Subjot you can easily unfollow specific aspects
including a broadcast subject.

~~~
joshu
sure, that makes sense.

i feel like you will have to have aggregate topic categories (everything about
topic x) to get enough traffic in that topic. remember that there is typically
a 10:1 reader:poster ratio (or more!) and that is what will get spammed.

my gut sense is that if you make topic directories for people to sign up to
you are adding transaction costs to get people into the system.

i'm not at all sure what the solution is, though.

on cluedb i made it so that multiple people had to use the same tag on an item
before it showed up. cluedb has approximately zero traffic, however.

~~~
ccarella
Definitely. We currently have higher level topic areas here -
<http://subjot.com/explore#featured> but that whole system is still a work in
progress.

We have been playing with some ML/NLP type stuff to cluster subjects that are
the same. So we can tell if your post about Football is actually NFL or
Premiere League... but we're a super small team and its a bit to early to put
that stuff into production yet.

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Ade_Lack
If you want to try Subjot you could start with HN on Subjot:
<http://subjot.com/all/hn> OR tell us about your startup:
<http://subjot.com/all/startup> and the feedback tag is getting lively too:
<http://subjot.com/all/feedback>

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mdebenedittis
I've been enjoying Subjot's the private beta for a few months now. A few of my
friends are on as well. I'm very happy to not have to listen to them drone on
about a couple of topics that usually dominate their twitter feeds.

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Ade_Lack
Been on the Subjot BETA for a couple of months and have only been totally
impressed. May have a few scaling issues around topic tags but from what I
have seen so far no reason why this team couldn't tackle it. Great work!

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andredieb
I tried to use it for a while but gave up when I couldn't find a simple way of
finding my twitter follows that also have a Subjot account. Did anyone
tried/succeeded doing this?

~~~
ccarella
This would be the url to use <http://subjot.com/explore#friends>

You can find it via Explore in the header and then People on the sidebar.

~~~
andredieb
Thank you for your reply! ;)

It seems I don't have any twitter friends on Subjot, yet..

Congratulations on Subjot! I really like the idea. Are there plans for some
kind of 'reputation' for people in specific subjects they talk about?

~~~
ccarella
We don't have a solid design for that but we've definitely kicked around the
idea. If I want to find the top jotters on NFL, it would be great to see some
sort of ranked list.

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xyzzyb
Looks a lot like byteposts: a subject-oriented twitter/irc hybrid.

