

Follow up to our HN name-badge-printing story: We're now revealing "View" - felixchan
http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/05/view/

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felixchan
Hi Hacker News,

After our bootstrapping story that we wrote on HN
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2222522>), TechCrunch wrote about us,
and we're really excited to finally reveal our product, View, to the public.

We hope you guys are excited about this as we are!

Thanks for all the support, Hacker News! (And also, thanks to the beta testers
--you guys rock.)

-Felix and Zac :)

~~~
nfriedly
Do you have your own site for people who boycott tech crunch links? ;)

~~~
zbowling
Here you go.... <http://view.io/>

~~~
OncomingStorm
I'm going to sound harsh but please don't take it the wrong way. Take it for
the literal words.

This has to(almost) be the worst user interface I have ever seen.

I can understand the Yes/No but if a user says No I do not have a smartphone,
you STILL need to show them your product.

Otherwise you're alienating a possible future customer, and more importantly
you're leaving a bad taste in someone's mouth and I'm going to go tell 3
friends who are going to tell 3 friends. You understand the rest I'm sure.

~~~
zbowling
you know your right.

you get two guys in a room coding all day for months, and as much as we try to
step back and walk through it again, we always seem to miss something so
obvious. beta testers bypass this screen so we never got input.

thanks!

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zdw
This seems abusable... imagine photoshopping a picture to reflect poorly on a
competitor, spoofing the GPS and then getting fake accounts to vote it up.

This is not a unique criticism - all social media is subject to attack cases
like this - the difference here would be that pictures tend to carry more
weight than a simple textual message.

~~~
zbowling
Moderation takes care of it (everyone is a moderator in a way similar to
Reddit). Enough irrelevant clicks and it's gone.

The relevancy algorithm also solves it partly when you upvote and downvote
enough things and the system build can build up some profile vectors for you
to improve ranking for yourself.

We did some really through analysis and built a bunch of statistical models
and tests. We think we can handle the problem makers and still try to maintain
highly personal relevant and realtime posts wherever you are at.

As a test, we scrapped 4chan and dumped posts of that scum at random
intervals. Beta users killed it really fast and quality didn't suffer. Turned
it into a game a little bit and it reveled our early evangelists.

The trick is doing all this relevancy matching without crippling scaling
issues when we turn up the dial on users. Really fun engineering problem.

~~~
jarin
Haha I love it, 4chan as a spam testing tool.

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warrenwilkinson
Thats a cool idea. I'd never heard of location-relevancy before, but it sounds
way more useful to me than locations other big startup area: 'tell me where my
friends are'.

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rwhitman
Very cool. I could see myself using this. Really hope an android-native
version is on its way

